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THE FLE 




W. MACNEILE DIXON 



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THE FLEETS 
BEHIND THE FLEET 



THE FLEETS 
BEHIND THE FLEET 

THE WORK OF 

THE MERCHANT SEAMEN 

AND FISHERMEN 

IN THE WAR 



Wr MAGNEILE DIXON 

PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW 
AUTHOR OF "the BRITISH NAVY AT WAR " 



WITH MAPS AND APPENDICES 



HODDER AND STOUGHTON 

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO 



ZD-5"8I 



i 
11 



NOTE 

Needless to say, many of the most interesting 
exploits of our merchant sailors and fishermen 
must for the present remain behind the veil, 
but, if the Fates permit, the author hopes at 
a later date to enlarge the book so as to make it 
a worthier record of their unrivalled doings. 
He would therefore be grateful to any corre- 
spondents who cared to send him any account 
of seafaring experiences during the war likely 
to contribute to that end. He desires also to 
take advantage of this opportunity of return- 
ing thanks to those correspondents who have 
already taken a friendly interest in the under- 
taking, and of expressing his obligations to 
several anonymous writers from whose articles 
in the press he has drawn some of the passages 
here quoted. 

W. M. D. 



CONTENTS 

OLD SAILORS 9 



PAGE 



A MARITIME NATION . . . . H 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH . . 26 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE . 46 



THE MINE-FISHERS . . . . Ji 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS .... 94 



APPENDIX A 

Summary of the Losses sustained by Neutrals 
FROM August 8th, 1914, to April 26th, 
1917. .... 129 

7 



8 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 
APPENDIX B 



PAGB 



Imports during the War. . .130 

APPENDIX C 

Strength of the Royal Naval Reserve on 

THE 1ST OF January 19 14 . . 131 

APPENDIX D 

Value of Imports for Home Consumption 

and Exports of Home Produce . 131 

APPENDIX E 

Firing on Survivors in Boats . . 132 



THE FLEETS 
BEHIND THE FLEET 



OLD SAILORS 

With many an old Sailor, on many an old ship, 
Who hoisted out many a barrel on to many an old slip, 
- And went below to his hammock or to a can of flip 

Like an old Sailor of the Queen's 

And the Queen's old Sailor. 

With many an old brave captain we shall never know. 
Who walked the decks under the colours when the 

winds did blow. 
And made the planks red with his blood before they 
carried him below 

Like an old Sailor of the Queen's 
And the Queen's old Sailor. 

And in Davy Jones's Taverns may they sit at ease, 
With their old tarpaulin aprons over their old knees, 
Singing their old sea ballads and yarning of the seas 
Like good old Sailors of the Queen's 
And the Queen's old Sailors. 

From A Sailor's Garland, 
edited by John Masefield. 

What follows is not written to praise our 
merchant sailors and fishermen. They are 



10 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

indeed worthy of all praise. But we looked 
for nothing else than that they would in 
every circumstance of trial and danger show 
themselves to be what they are, peerless. 
At what date or on what occasion in 
their history have they failed ? From a 
fierier ordeal a firmer courage and a harder 
resolution have emerged, as we believed 
they would. Of this the world is already 
very well aware. Their friends know it 
and their foes. What remains then is not 
to praise them but to instruct ourselves. 
Our vision has been limited. We knew 
that in the Navy lay our strength, but in 
our thoughts we defined it as the Royal 
Navy. Till these troubled years the Merchant 
Service had for many Englishmen only a 
shadowy existence. For the first time it has 
come acutely home to us that " the sea is 
all one, the navy is all one." That ships are 
Britain's treasury, her shipping trade her 
most vital industry, her seafaring population 
her unique possession, the sea itself her 
partner in her national fortunes, and her 
merchant sailors the builders of her empire, 
have been facts manifest enough to others, 
perceived perhaps by Britons in moments of 



OLD SAILORS ii 

reflection, but how rarely mirrored in the full 
light of national consciousness. 

Thy story, thy glory, 

The very fame of thee, 
It rose not, it grows not, 

It comes not, save by sea. 

Let it not be said that we shall do justice 
to our merchant sailors and fishermen when 
the history of their doings in these days comes 
to be written. It will never be written. 
And for several good and sufficient reasons. 
Battles on sea or land may be described, 
great moments in the dreary annals of war. 
In armies masses of men, in fleets numbers 
of ships act together, and some picture of 
the great assault or the heroic defence can 
be painted in broad outlines. But the ships 
of the merchant service are solitary wayfarers, 
scattered units in a waste of waters. The 
adventures of a thousand ships, the deeds of 
a thousand skippers, how are these to be set 
forth in a convenient handbook ? On each 
the sleepless watch, on each the long anxious 
hours, and for how many of them the same 
tragic disaster ? One record is like another 
record ; one story like another story. And 
as for their deeds they differ hardly at all. 



12 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

If to meet the crisis as it should be met, with 
perfect skill and perfect devotion to duty, 
be heroism, then all are heroes. A hero 
to-day has for his Valhalla a newspaper 
paragraph. Many good men have walked 
the earth, as many good sailors have 
sailed the sea, without so much. Men do 
not always fight and die in the light, and 
legions of shining act? must remain unsung. 
With the best will in the world you cannot 
number the brave men in the world, nor 
make your battle canvas as huge as you 
please will you find room in it for all the 
gallant faces. If it be sad to think that they 
will be forgotten, it is inspiring to think they 
are so many. Because courage and resource 
and determination are every^vhere, a single 
scene or act is nowhere elevated above the 
rest. The unit is merged in the magnificent 
total. You will say they form a wonderful 
series. It is indisputable, but the historian 
cannot unify such a series or do justice to the 
individuals who form it. Not this or that 
exceptional act which chance reveals, but the 
compact body of its achievement, the pluck, 
the unshaken heart of the whole service is 
the impressive thing. So we may put aside 



OLD SAILORS 13 

the hope that the future will help us better 
than the present to appreciate the " captains 
courageous " who in our time have upheld 
the long incomparable tradition of British 
seamen and seamanship. Yet if Britain be 
persuaded by their deeds to do justice to 
their successors, which will be nothing more 
than to do justice to herself, we may believe 
that even though unrecorded nothing has 
been lost. In the temple or cathedral or 
national monument one does not count less 
essential or less worthy the stones that are 
hid from view. 



A MARITIME NATION 

I built the ships and I sailed the ships, and they lie in my 

havens fair, 
With the sea-god's salt on their crusted plates, and the 

green of the sea-nymph's hair ; 
I built the ships and I sailed the ships, on the slack and 

the flowing tide ; 
Will ye match my skill in the hulls I build on the narrow 

seas or wide ? 
Will ye match my men from the oceans five, or better the 

work of their hands 
From the books that are writ or the tales that are told, the 

tales of the hundred lands ? 

Cease to think of Britain's naval power in 
terms of battleships and cruisers and you 
begin to understand it. Think of it rather 
in terms of trade routes and navigation, of 
ship and dockyards, of busy ports and har- 
bours, of a deeply indented coast-line, 7000 
miles in length ; of great rivers flowing 
into wide estuaries ; of liners and tramps ; 
weatherly east coast trawlers and burly 
Penzance luggers ; of ancient fishing villages 
looking out from every bay and rocky inlet. 

34 



A MARITIME NATION 15 

Built hy nature to be the home of a maritime 
people, inhabited hy the descendants of sea- 
faring races, accessible only from other lands 
hy water, every stone in British history is 
fitted into a geographical foundation. Not 
many of us know it, but we are none the less 
children of the sea and live by it. We are 
its captives and masters, imprisoned by it 
and forcing it to serve our needs. In the 
language daily on our lips are phrases salt as 
the ocean itself — ^we " make headway " and 
" weather a diflBculty " ; we are " taken 
aback," or " out of soundings," or have " the 
wind taken out of our sails," or discern " rocks 
ahead," or find " another shot in the locker." 
To the people who made this language the sea 
has been the " nursing-mother." View it 
thus, and the Royal Navy becomes no more 
than a symbol, the expression of a peculiar 
national life. Science may think of it as the 
tough exterior hide, the armour, like that of 
the dinosaurus, with which nature in the 
process of evolution provides her mightiest 
creatures. It is, in fact, simply the glittering 
shaft on the string of a powerful bow, the 
power is in the bow and not the arrow. 
Anyone can see that the mere possession of 



i6 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

a fleet cannot bestow naval power. The 
Royal Navy occupies indeed to-day the centre 
of the picture, yet without the vast and 
supporting background of arsenals, building- 
yards, docks, harbours, bases, a fleet is nothing. 
Behind it lives, moves, and has its being the 
great maritime nation — an organisation of 
extreme complexity, with its coal and iron 
mines, its manufactories, its endless machinery 
and, far above all, its age-long tradition and 
experience of the sea. 

View it historically, and the Royal Navy is 
the heir of the Merchant Service, the inheritor 
of its fighting spirit and tradition. Not till 
Victoria's reign was any clear line of division 
drawn between the merchant sailor and the 
man-of-war's-man. Both stood together in 
the nation's first line of defence during the 
critical moments of its history, when Philip 
planned his great coup, and Napoleon bestrode 
the world like a Colossus. And now that the 
fiery wheel of fate has revolved once more 
and swept the peoples into the maelstrom of 
war, history repeats itself, and the mariners 
of England from the merchant and fishing 
fleets are fighting men once more as in the 
old and famous davs. 



A MARITIME NATION 17 

Histories, as they have too often been 
written, obscure the vision and provide a 
false perspective. Faithful chronicles no 
doubt of the red-letter days of battle, but 
how few and far between were the battles 
in our long naval wars ! Too often the 
histories speak of the Navy as if it were a 
thing apart, a mere fighting instrument, 
and forget to tell us of the fleets behind 
the fleet ; of the merchant sailors and the 
fishermen, the pioneers and the builders 
of our sea-supported confederacy. 

These " traders," it was said of the Eliza- 
bethan seamen, " escaped the notice of kings 
and chroniclers." Nevertheless it was these 
men who saved England and America from 
becoming provinces of Spain. We English- 
men forget, if we have ever considered and 
known, that in all her naval enterprises, and 
they have not been few, the country invari- 
ably called upon her merchantmen and fisher 
folk, upon all her resources in men and 
ships. The '* navy," as we call it, what has 
history to say of it ? That until the reign 
of Henry VIII., the pious founder of the 
Royal Navy, it was, in fact, neither more nor 
less than England's mercantile marine. As 

B 



i8 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

for Elizabeth's tall ships and proud captains, 
Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher and many 
another, they were stout merchant skippers, 
and of the fleet which met the Great Armada, 
near upon two hundred sail, but thirty-four 
belonged to the Queen's Navy. In that 
expedition to Cadiz, too, which singed the 
whiskers of His Majesty of Spain, not more 
than five or six in a fleet of forty vessels were 
men-of-war. In its palmy days the Merchant 
Navy was accustomed and very well able to 
look after itself, and not seldom lent a hand 
in affairs of magnitude and importance. 
Trading and fighting indeed went together ; 
buccaneers and privateers abounded, and the 
line between war and peace was negligently 
drawn. Peace there might be on land, but 
never a year passed, never a month for that 
matter, without its encounters at sea. 

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries it was much the same. Britain's 
" navy " consisted of little more than mer- 
chantmen and their crews ; for themselves 
and for her they traded ; for themselves and 
for her they fought. As the records show, 
officers of the Royal Navy on half-pay or the 
retired list were not too proud to go to sea in 



A MARITIME NATION 19 

command of merchantmen, a practice which 
continued till the crowning year of 18 15. 
On the " glorious first of June " 1796, the 
Merchant Service won his victory for Lord 
Howe, and the fleets of Hood and Nelson must 
have employed not less than fifty thousand 
men, who learnt their sea-going and their 
fighting as fishermen or traders. Nelson 
himself — symbol let it be of the inseparable 
fellowship — served his apprenticeship on a 
merchantman, and in those days service 
afloat, whether in king's ship or trader, 
counted for promotion in the Royal Navy. 
As for fighting, no one ever complained 
that the men of the Merchant Service shrank 
from undertaking that business, or fell short 
in the performance of it. 

It was a merchant ship, the Mountjoy, that 
in 1689, under the fire of the shore batteries, 
led the vessels sent to the relief of Derry. 
She rammed and shattered the boom, forced 
the barrier, and raised the historic siege. 
" To prevent all thoughts among my men of 
surrendering ye ship," wrote the commander 
of the Chambers, an East India merchant 
vessel in 1703, when attacked by a French 
sixty-four and a frigate, " I nailed the ensigne 



20 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

to the staff from head to foot, and stapled 
and fore-cockt the ensigne staff fast up. I 
resolved to part with ship and life together." 
In 1804 the East India Company's fleet in the 
China Seas engaged, beat off and pursued a 
powerful squadron of war vessels which con- 
tained two frigates and a line-of-battle ship of 
seventy-four guns, under the Comte de Linois. 
As for transport, how many expeditions of 
British soldiers have been ferried by British 
merchantmen ? A fleet of no less than ninety 
vessels took part in the great expedition to the 
Crimea in 1854, which carried thirty thou- 
sand men and three thousand horses to the 
distant seat of war ; while in i860 two hundred 
vessels transported troops to China. " I 
do not remember," wrote Lord Wolseley, 
" having witnessed a grander sight than our 
fleet presented when steering for the Peiho. 
All ships were under full sail, the breeze being 
just powerful enough to send them along at 
about five knots an hour, and yet no more 
than rippled the sea's surface, which shone 
with all the golden hues of a brilliant sunshine. 
The ships were in long lines, one vessel 
behind the other, with a man-of-war leading 
each line. . . . Looking upon that brilliant 



A MARITIME NATION 21 

naval spectacle I could scarcely realise the 
fact of being some 16,000 miles from 
England." 

During the South African War, conducted 
6000 miles from home, almost a million 
soldiers were carried across the seas, and about 
a million tons of stores. Hundreds of trading 
vessels were then employed. To-day we may 
count these elementary operations, for the 
fighting navy held the sea, and better parallels 
to the work of our merchant seamen in these 
times may be found in our earlier wars. 

Gradually, indeed during the last hundred 
years, the services drew apart. Gradually 
the Board of Trade usurped the control of 
the Royal prerogative, exercised through the 
Admiralty, of the nation's shipping ; but the 
hand of war has turned back the leaves, and 
Britain's naval power has again to be cal- 
culated, as it should never have ceased to 
be calculated, in the broad terms of men 
and ships ; the extent and efficiency not of 
this service or that, but of the assembled and 
fraternal society of the sea. In its charge 
to-day is the destiny of the nations. 

It is a good story that of the British sailor 
in the long centuries that lie between us and 



22 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

Beowulf, the first seafarer and warrior in the 
seventh century, of which our literature tells. 
And if ever there was a tale to catch the ear 
it lies to the hand of the future historian of 
the Merchant Marine, for without it, without 
the resolution and enterprise with which it 
espoused the country's cause, the story were 
long since ended. That is the gist of the 
matter, and argument about it there can be 
none. Not for a moment is it disputable 
that despite all its immense resources and 
striking power the Grand Fleet could not 
have saved Europe or Britain as they have 
been saved from ruinous defeat. Without 
her merchant sailors, without her fisher-folk 
in this war as waged with a cunning and 
ruthless foe, the life-blood of Britain would 
inevitably have ebbed away drop by drop, 
a creeping and fatal paralysis overtaken her. 
Had her merchant sailors faltered, had her 
fisher-folk been less resolute, had their old 
qualities not sprung forth to meet the new 
and deadly perils, the destiny of the world 
would have been other than it will be. Not 
once or twice have they thus stood across the 
dragon's path. History, then, repeats itself, 
but on a scale by sea and land that dwarfs 



A MARITIME NATION 23 

even the spacious days when the Armada 
sailed from Spain, or Nelson scoured the 
Mediterranean. History repeats itself, but 
with a difference. The incidence of the 
pressure and the strain, protracted, exhaust- 
ing, of this war, has been less directly upon 
the Grand Fleet, equal and more than equal 
to all that it has been called upon to perform. 
The incidence of the pressure has fallen, as 
it has always fallen, upon those men who 
were not by profession of the fighting com- 
pany ; upon ships and men engaged till the 
fateful year 1914 in peaceful callings ; toilers 
of the deep who rolled round the world on 
the trade routes, or pursued the whale south 
of the equatorial line, or dragged their heavy 
trawls through the cold seas of the north. 

It is no new thing then for men of the 
Merchant Service to man their guns and fight 
their ships. And not for the first time has 
Britain mobilised all her maritime resources. 
Never before, however, in a fashion so far- 
reaching or so impressive. Her previous 
history is written over again, but in larger 
characters. Never before have her merchant 
navies been called upon to support so 
stupendous an operation, to carry almost 



24 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

the whole weight of transport and supplies 
for millions of fighting men. Since ships 
are the railroads of the Allies ; since without 
ships neither soldiers nor guns can reach the 
distant seats of war ; since without them 
Britain herself cannot hope to sustain her 
life — ships and sailors have been and are, 
as they have been in the past, the first and 
last and utterly essential element. 

None but a great maritime people, however 
powerful its fighting fleets, could have faced 
or upheld for a week the gigantic under- 
taking. One in thirty of the men of these 
our islands is a sailor. We speak of an 
empire of thirteen million square miles, of 
four hundred milHons of inhabitants. We 
should speak of it as an empire of ships and 
sailors, an empire of tonnage — twenty millions 
of it — carrying the weight of half the world's 
goods, a voyaging empire, in everlasting motion 
on the seas, that in days of peace serves every 1 

race and country — 

To give the poles the produce of the sun, m 

And knit the unsocial climates into one, a 

that unites in a close-wrought texture the 
whole fabric of civilisation, links island to 



A MARITIME NATION 25 

island, continent to continent ; a prodigious 
network of travel. The empire of ships, that 
has brought the East to meet the West, 
sought out the far and foreign lands, enabled 
China and India and the Isles to interchange 
ideas and gifts with Europe, is not the fleet 
of battleships but that other which, in times 
of peace, extended in a fashion no other 
instrument has ever rivalled, and enriched 
beyond arithmetic the intercourse and re- 
sources of mankind. 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 

These are the men who sailed with Drake, 

Masters and mates and crew ; 
These are the men, and the ways they take 

Are the old ways through and through ; 

These are the men he knew. 

The communications of the Great Alliance 
— it is their point of vulnerability — are sea 
communications, and if that keystone slips, 

Rome in Tiber melts, and the wide arch 
Of the ranged Empire falls. 

From the first the Central Powers held the 
splendid advantage of the interior and shorter 
lines. Theirs were the spokes of the wheel, 
the spokes along which run the railways. 
On the circumference of the wheel held by 
the Alliance, on the rim of ocean, went and 
came all things — men and the interminable 
machinery of war. The Allied and far longer 
lines therefore, on the arc of an immense 
circle, traverse the sea from Archangel to 
Gibraltar ; from Gibraltar to Suez or the 

26 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 27 

Cape ; from Suez to Colombo ; from 
Colombo to Melbourne ; from Melbourne 
to Vladivostock. Nothing less was here 
required than a railroad belting the globe, 
whose rolling-stock was ships. And the 
problem faced by Britain, as the great mari- 
time partner in the alliance of 191 3, remains 
essentially a problem of sea transport, and 
transport on a scale wholly without parallel 
in the world's history. Since Britain herself 
had never dreamt of raising an army of five 
million men, provision for the bridge of boats 
required for such numbers, with all their 
battle apparatus, had found no place in her 
plans. But she had ships and sailors. 

" We have just returned here after making 
three trips with troops from Southampton 
to France," wrote an officer. " It was really 
marvellous work. Southampton was full of 
troop-ships and like clock-work they were 
handled. Every ship had a number allotted 
to her and a special signal. One ship would 
arrive alongside, fill up her holds and decks, 
and, in less than half-an-hour, she was away 
again. As soon as they got one vessel off her 
berth, up would go the signal for another 
steamer to take her place, and so the work 



28 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

went on. Ship followed ship off the port 
like a line of vessels manoeuvring. Orders 
came for 94 to go alongside. Up went the 
signal, and in less time than it takes one to 
write we were following the rest." 

The ferrying of vast human and material 
cargoes across the Channel — an undertaking 
one might think serious enough — was in fact 
a trifle compared with the undertaking as a 
whole ; for, since the recruiting areas for 
Britain's forces lay in every latitude, there 
fell within it the transference of great bodies 
of troops from Australia and New Zealand, 
across 10,000 miles of ocean; from India, 
across 6000 miles ; from Canada, more than 
2000 miles away, and not, be it remembered, 
a transference to Britain or France only, but 
to Egypt, the Persian Gulf, the Dardanelles, 
Salonika — a transference continuous, unend- 
ing, processional. 

" It is not only a war with Germany," 
said Sir Edward Carson. " You have a war — 
a naval war — going on over the whole of the 
seas — ^war in the Channel, war in the Atlantic, 
war in the Pacific, war in the Mediterranean, 
war round Egypt, war in the Adriatic, war in 
Mesopotamia, war at Salonika, and day by 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 29 

day the Navy is called upon to supply the 
material for carrying on all these wars. Did 
anybody ever contemplate a war of that kind ? 
When I mention one figure to you that at the 
commencement of the war we had something 
like 150 small vessels for patrol work, and now 
we have something like 3000, you will see 
the gigantic feat that has been accomplished 
by the Navy. In all these theatres of war 
we have to provide patrols, convoys, mine- 
sweepers, mine-layers, air service, mine- 
carriers, fleet messengers." 

Owing to the demands of the Royal Navy 
upon the shipyards, additions to mercantile 
tonnage were out of the question. With 
the ordinary resources of peace the vast 
unapprehended responsibilities of war had to 
be met. There was no other way. Besides 
the armies and the great guns, the various 
belligerent zones called for hundreds of miles 
of railroad with engines and rolling-stock 
complete ; horses and mules and their fodder ; 
cargoes of wood for trench making ; river 
boats in sections for the Persian Gulf ; motor 
lorries, literally in thousands ; material and 
food for whole moving populations and their 
multiform activities. 



30 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

" During the last five or six weeks," said 
Sir William Robertson on May 12, "we 
have expended no less than 200,000 tons of 
munitions in France alone, and we have taken 
out some 50,000 tons of stones for making 
and mending roads." 

" Everything has been taken ashore," wrote 
an officer on transport service in the East, 
" by lighters and rafts. The major part of 
our cargo is railway material, cattle trucks, 
ambulance vans, oxen, horses, mules, fodder, 
ammunition, and troops. We have a mixture 
of everything necessary for warfare, from ' a 
needle to an elephant.' " 

Think also of the coal carried overseas to 
the Allies ; nitrates shipped from South, 
munitions from North America ; ore from 
Spain and the Mediterranean ; and con- 
template the dizzy shufiling on the high seas 
of these mighty freights. All the while the 
needs of peace remained inexorable. The 
sugar and the wheat, the cotton, coffee, and 
all the other requirements of the home 
population of these islands, had still unceasingly 
to be provided. The mind refuses to calculate 
in these dimensions ; our foot-rules will not 
measure them. Let us however write down 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 31 

the unthinkable figures. Eight millions of 
men ; ten million tons of supplies and 
explosives ; over a million sick and wounded ; 
over a million horses and mules ; fifty million 
gallons of petrol alone. These of course are 
merely the additional undertakings of war. 
To complete the picture one has to include 
ordinary imports and exports, such trifles 
as one hundred million hundredweights of 
wheat ; seven million tons of iron ore ; 
twenty-one million centals of cotton — the 
figures for 191 6. For the same twelve months 
the value of the home products exported was 
five hundred millions. British ships have been 
busy in these thundering years ! 

But the Allies, you will say, assisted. 
France had 360 ocean-going vessels, Italy 
about the same number. Russia, 174. 
Belgium, 6y, No doubt, yet these nations 
were nevertheless borrowers, not lenders. 
Their ships were far from sufficient for their 
own necessities, and to France, Britain, despite 
her own searching requirements, lent about 
600 ships, and to Italy about 400, a sixth 
of her own far from adequate supply. 
" Without our Mercantile Marine the Navy 
— and indeed the nation — could not exist," 



32 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

said Admiral Jellicoe. One perceives the 
truth of it. But the tale does not end there. 
About a hundred merchant ships were com- 
missioned as auxiliary cruisers and, armed 
with guns like the Carmania, took their share 
in the fighting. The Empress of Japan 
captured the collier Exford, the Macedonia 
rounded up the transports accompanying 
Von Spec, the Orama was in at the death 
of Dresden. Colliers too are needed for the 
Royal Navy ; supply, repair and depot ships ; 
distilling and aeroplane ships ; auxiliaries for 
the fighting flotillas and the great blockade 
patrol. Extending from the Shetlands to the 
coast of Greenland and the Arctic ice a wide 
net had to be flung whose meshes were British 
ships. And yet again in the narrow seas and 
in the defiles of the trade routes, day in and 
day out, the British trawlers— fleets of them — 
swept for the German mines. 

What were, in fact, the maritime resources 
that made these things at all possible ? At 
the outbreak of war Britain possessed over 
10,000 ships, and of these about 4000 ocean- 
going ships were over 1600 tons; of smaller 
ocean traders there were about 1000. Add 
to these the fishing trawlers and drifters, 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 33 

over 3000 of which are now in Government 
employ. Gradually the traders were re- 
quisitioned, at first for military then for 
national purposes. Sugar was the first article 
for which Government took responsibility, 
first and early. Then came wheat, maize, 
rice, and other grains. To these were added 
month by month many other commodities 
of which the authorities took charge, and 
for which they found the necessary tonnage. 
The pool of free ships diminished, contracted 
to narrow limits, and finally dried up. 
Britain's shipping virtually passed in 19 16 
wholly under national control. 

That is in brief the history of the ships ; 
but what of the crews ? What of the men 
and their willingness to serve under war con- 
ditions, surrounded by deadly risks ? If we in- 
clude over 100,000 fishermen, the marine popu- 
lation of the empire may be reckoned at not 
less than 300,000 men. Of these 170,000 are 
British seamen, 50,000 are Lascars, and 30,000 
belong to other nationalities. There you 
have the absolute total of sea-farers, to whose 
numbers, owing to their way of life and the 
peculiarity of their profession, it is impossible 
during war rapidly or greatly to add. No 



34 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

other reservoir of such skill and experience 
as theirs can anywhere be found. Perhaps 
the most valuable community in the world 
to-day, and certainly irreplacable. Means of 
replenishing it there is none. A Royal Com- 
mission appointed in 1858 reported that the 
nation " possesses in the Merchant Service 
elements of naval power such as no other 
Government enjoys," and in i860 the Royal 
Naval Reserve Act was passed, by which the 
Royal Naval Volunteers became the Royal 
Naval Reserve, and a force enrolled which, 
though inadequate in numbers, has proved 
of inestimable value. The Royal Naval 
Reserve man signs on for a term of five 
years ; undergoes each year a short period 
of training, and reports himself twice a year 
to the authorities. While in training he 
receives navy pay and a retaining fee of 
j^4, IDS. a year during service as a merchant 
seaman. Twenty years' service qualifies him 
for a pension and a medal. Belonging to this 
force there were at the outbreak of the war 
about 18,500 officers and men available, but 
the number of merchant sailors and fishermen 
serving with the combatant forces has been 
trebled, and now stands at 11,000 officers and 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 35 

65,000 men. Add to these 4828 officers and 
28,000 men of the R.N.V.R. and another 
100,000 merchant sailors who, since they 
share all the risks of a war with an enemy 
that makes no distinction between bel- 
ligerents and non-combatants, may well 
be included among Britain's defenders, and 
one begins to perceive the true nature and 
extent of the nation's maritime resources 
and the utter dependence upon these resources 
of an island kingdom — the vulnerable heart 
of a sea-sundered empire. In 1893 the 
Imperial Merchant Service Guild had been 
established, a body, the value of whose 
services, already notable, cannot yet be fully 
calculated. To it, and to the profession it 
represents, the nation will yet do justice. 
For the professional skill and invincible 
courage of her merchant seamen has at 
length made clear to Britain the secret of 
her strength ; the knowledge that to them 
she owes her place and power in the world. 
She has found in them the same skill and the 
same courage with which their forefathers 
sailed and fought in all the country's 
earlier wars. " The submarine scare," said the 
Deutsche Tageszeitung^ '' has struck England 



36 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

with paralysing effect, and the whole sea is 
as if swept clean at one blow." To this 
one answers that the sailing of no British 
ship has been delayed by an hour by fear 
of the submarine menace. If the sea be 
indeed swept clear of ships, how strange that 
every week records its batch of victims ! 
A sufficient testimony, one would think, to 
their presence, and, might not one add, of 
equal eloquence in their praise ? It was 
assumed — a magnificent assumption — that a 
British crew could never fail. It never did. 
The Vedamore was torpedoed off the coast 
of Ireland, and most of her crew killed or 
drowned. In wild and wintry weather the 
survivors, sixteen in all, after many hours' 
exposure in open boats, made a successful 
landing. These sixteen reached London and 
proposed, you will say, to snatch a few days' 
rest, a little comfort after their miseries. 
Their object was a different one : — to ask 
for a new ship. " Had enough ? " one of 
the crew of the torpedoed Southland was 
asked, when he came ashore. " Not me," 
he replied, " I shall be off again as soon as I 
can find a berth." " If," said one torpedoed 
seaman, " there were fifty times the number 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 37 

of submarines it wouldn't make no difference 
to us. While there's a ship afloat there will be 
plenty to man her. My mates and I were 
torpedoed a fortnight ago, and just as soon as 
we get another ship we shall be off." 

You may say, " It is not natural that there 
should have been no failures." Well, here is 
one. " Only a short while ago," said Mr Cuth- 
bert Laws, " we found it necessary to prosecute 
a seaman who had failed to join a transport, 
and there was no doubt that he was technically 
guilty, but he set up and successfully sus- 
tained a defence which is unique in the 
annals of the Mercantile Marine. He ad- 
mitted that he had failed to join the vessel, 
but he said that his reason for doing so was 
that his shipmates refused to sail with him 
because he had already been torpedoed six 
times. In other words, while they were 
prepared to take the ordinary sporting chance 
of being blown up, they were not prepared 
to accept the handicap of having a Jonah 
on board ! " She has her faults, has Britain, 
but she still breeds men : and mothers of 
men. Take the authentic circumstance of 
the vessel whose crew were not of British 
stock. They declined when safely in port 



38 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

to undertake another and risky voyage. But 
there appeared to them next day an English- 
woman, the Captain's wife, with the announce- 
ment, perhaps unwelcome, that she proposed 
on that trip to accompany her husband. 
She went ; and with her, for their manhood's 
sake, the reluctant crew. 

The story of docks and harbours, of the 
loading and unloading of the war freights, 
merits a chapter of its own. To understand 
it you must remember that ships are of many 
sizes and of very varying draught. The 
depths of water in the ports, the tides, the 
quay accommodation, the provision of cranes 
and sorting sheds, of available railway trucks 
have in each case to be considered. Grain 
requires one type of machinery for unloading, 
timber another, fruit or meat yet another. 
If the cargo be mixed and consigned perhaps 
to hundreds of dealers, in various parts of 
the country, sorting sheds are a necessity. 
Many harbours provide only for small coasting 
craft and cannot accommodate large ocean 
traders, many are affected by tide and quite 
unprovided with docks ; others again lack 
quay and truck accommodation save of the 
simplest order. There is also the problem of 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 39 

dock labourers, men skilled in the handling 
of particular types of cargo. Manifestly you 
cannot order any ship to any port. Vessels 
must therefore run to their usual harbours 
and to provide the machinery for " turning 
them " rapidly round presents, under the 
congested conditions of war, a problem of 
extreme complexity. 

" It is one of the ports," wrote a corre- 
spondent in the Times, " which the enemy 
has best reason to wish to close ; a port, not 
in the British Isles, through which, since the 
war began, there has flowed a continuous 
stream of war material and of the food of 
armies. You pick your way for miles along 
the edges of stone quays, stepping over cables, 
past basin after basin and crossing channels by 
high-sided truss bridges, which swing to let 
the ships go through. For ships still go 
through. They never seem to stop. Always 
one bridge or another is swinging slowly to 
let a great steel freighter come in or a little 
panting tug go out with a tall bare-masted 
barque or schooner gliding behind her. 

" Hardly a berth along all the miles of quays 
is vacant ; great 12,000-ton leviathans (what 
a mark for a torpedo !) just in from the other 



40 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

side of the world and little slab-sided boats 
that bring timber from the north. They 
have come by every possible sea-road ; and 
they go to every point of the compass. 

*' And the quays ! Somewhere in the 
world, one supposes, there must be a use for 
all that cotton, the acres of ragged bales piled 
higher than the second storeys of the houses 
which face the sea and from which great 
flocks blow off to litter the roadways. Can 
it be that we on the Western front are doing 
as Andrew Jackson's men did and are building 
the parapets and breastworks of our trenches 
of cotton bales ? Then there are leagues of 
crates and frails and sacks and cases and 
barrels. One can only guess at some of the 
contents ; but the air for a hundred yards is 
heavy with the smell of coffee and then of 
fruit. Those mountains there are made of 
sacks which bear the brand of Minneapolis 
flouring mills ; and all that wilderness of 
barrels proclaims itself to be oil. The length 
of a row of houses is nothing but great hanks 
piled 15 feet high of 20 feet long canes ; more 
canes, it seems, than could grow in all Ceylon. 

" Flat cases of tinplate, packed evenly in 
solid masses, cover areas as big as Trafalgar 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 41 

Square ; and then the iron and steel ! Girders 
and I-beams and structural iron of every sort, 
plates and rods and rails and huge parts of 
machines which only an engineer could name ; 
coiled wire enough — it really seems no ex- 
aggeration — to re-string all the telegraph 
and telephone lines of the world." 

Heavy munition trains, miles upon miles 
of them, are daily pouring into the 
Southern ports. Great guns, railway trucks, 
engines and rails form a part of these 
stupendous freights. There are many har- 
bours in the South, but few capable of 
berthing, loading, and unloading the largest 
liners, and if we would criticise these opera- 
tions, and free criticism of them has been 
after our national manner, plentiful, we 
should understand that to the transport 
work of peace that of the greatest of wars 
has been added, and understand too that the 
shipping problem involves much more than 
ships, and requires to-day something like the 
higher mathematics for its solution. 

" Both are now one service in spirit," 
wrote Admiral Jellicoe of the Royal Navy 
and the Mercantile Marine, " and never 
have British seamen united in a more stern 



42 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

and mighty cause." Say what we will, be 
it in prose or verse, it falls short of their de- 
serving. The merchant sailor and the fisher- 
man has had each his share in the fighting 
and more than his share in the labours of 
the war. They took part in Jutland and the 
earlier battles. Some are in command of 
destroyers and torpedo boats ; others of 
vessels on the blockade patrol or of submarine 
chasers ; others again of transport and repair 
ships. On mine-carriers and mine-sweepers 
they serve ; on paddle steamers and panting 
tug boats ; on water ships and balloon 
ships ; on salvage and escort work. They are 
to be found on trawlers and drifters and 
motor craft ; on captured German steamers, 
now playfully renamed, the Hun line — Hun- 
gerford^ Hunstanton ; on oilers and colliers 
and meat ships, in the North Sea and 
Mediterranean and the distant oceans ; on 
transport and dispatch, on observation and 
remount and hospital vessels everywhere. 
They gathered the great armies from the ends 
of the earth, they fuel and munition the 
Grand Fleet ; the Suez Canal knows them 
and the Royal Indian Marine and the African 
rivers. No sea that has not seen them, " no 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 43 

climate that is not witness to their toils." 
For proof that they are a pugnacious breed 
read the story of the Gallipoli landings, 
where Commander Unwin and Midshipman 
Drewry won each his Victoria Cross, where 
supplies were daily put ashore under the 
shrapnel fire from Turkish batteries ; read 
the story of CarmanicCs fight with Cap 
Trafalgar ; of Clan M'Tamsh and her spirited 
combat with Mozve, which filled the seamen 
of the Grand Fleet with delighted admiration. 
Read of the whalers in Sudi harbour, of the 
attacks on Jubassi in the Cameroons ; of the 
actions on the Tigris and Rufigi rivers, in all 
which actions officers of the Merchant Service 
distinguished themselves. Called upon for 
every type of action, navigating under war 
conditions by lightless coasts, responsible for 
new and strange undertakings, in armed or 
defenceless craft, on the bridge of sinking 
ships or adrift in open boats, the fearless 
spirit of the British sailor meets the occasion, 
and as with his ancestor and prototype of 
Viking times, the harder the enterprise the 
harder grows his heart. 

It is good for us now and then to contem- 
plate men nobler than ourselves ; to be told 



44 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

that volunteers over sixty years of age paid 
their own passage from Australia to serve 
afloat, that there is at least one engineer — 
and a health to him — of over eighty with a 
commission in the Royal Naval Reserve. 
For who is there so dead at heart as not to 
covet so springing and mounting a spirit ? 
" I have taken the depth of the water," 
said Admiral Duncan in the engagement off 
the Texel, " and when the Venerable goes 
down, my flag will still fly." 

There is something in it, this companionship 
with the sea, that kindles what is heroic in a 
race to the finest resolution. Perhaps it is 
not to be expected that we shore- dwellers 
should have more than a languid appreciation 
of hardships and labours indescribable, and 
should read tales of the sea rather for pleasure 
than edification, but if ever a people had 
masters in the school of nobility we are 
fortunate in our teachers of to-day. Already 
over 3000 men and officers of the Royal Naval 
Reserve have fallen in their country's service, 
and of merchant sailors pursuing their ordin- 
ary calling not fewer. Born fighters, you 
will say, the British. Yes, but these men 
died most of them without hope of glory. 



THE KEYSTONE OF THE ARCH 45 

When Captain Wicks of the Straton dashed 
in among the wreckage of the sinking Runo 
and assisted in the saving of two hundred 
lives, the look-out man shouted to him, 
" Two mines right ahead, sir." " Can't be 
helped," replied the Captain, " it is risking 
lives to save lives." Which is indeed, in a 
sentence, the daily task, whatever or wherever 
the allotted posts of these cavaliers of the sea. 
The day dawns or the night descends, to find 
them on the bridge or in the engine-room, 
north or south of the Line, running the grim 
gauntlet of murderous things that the sea, 
with all its grey ages of experience, never 
before has known. 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 

Come all ye jolly mariners, and list ye while I tell, 
Afore we heave the capstan round and meet the Channel 

swell. 
Of a handy ship, and sailor lads and women folk, a score, 
And gallant gentlemen who sail below the ocean floor ; 
A tale as new, and strange, and true as any historie. 

Of the German law and courtesie 

And custom of the sea. 

That our merchant seamen would be called 
upon to face the fiercest blast of the storm 
would have seemed a fantastic prophecy. 
Look, however, at the circumstances. They 
have been called paradoxical, unprecedented 
in the whole previous history of naval war. 
To think of it! A fleet— the British-— 
of immeasurable and unchallenged strength, 
beyond debate absolute upon the seas, is 
found unable to protect its country's com- 
merce ! Slowly it rose and took shape, this 
spectre of an incredible, amazing situation. 
A new situation ? Yes, in a way, for the 
weapons were new, but not so new as it 

46 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 47 

appears. Have any of us considered the losses 
of our Mercantile Marine in the American or 
the Napoleonic wars ? During the latter we 
captured 440 French ships. How many did 
we lose ? 5314 British vessels were captured 
by the French ! Our losses were over 40 
per cent, of our tonnage! This, remember, 
was in Nelson's days, when we held com- 
mand of the sea. With these facts in mind 
one is better able to judge the price of sea 
supremacy and to understand that fleets have 
never been able wholly to safeguard commerce. 
As in our previous history the situation arises 
from the very supremacy of the Grand Fleet, 
a supremacy so complete as to leave no 
alternative to the weaker naval power which, 
in such circumstances, invariably resorts to 
the guerre de course. In the under water 
campaign we have a new form of attack, 
but it is simply the confession that upon the 
sea Germany was powerless and had abandoned 
hope. No less a confession, too, that beneath 
the sea and against the British Navy she was 
equally powerless. Who can doubt that had 
the chance been given she would unhesi- 
tatingly have preferred victory in fair fight, 
a victory resounding and glorious. That 



48 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

denied her, she declined upon victory without 
honour, of any pattern and at any price. 
She gave free range to her unmatched genius 
for destruction. 

Men, when they discussed naval warfare, 
viewed it with speculative eye as a clash of 
battleships in one or two terrific, decisive, 
world-shaking encounters. Few, if any, fore- 
saw that the enemy, declining the great issue, 
would aim at a slow grinding pressure, adopt- 
ing a kind of warfare in which the fighting 
fleets would hardly feel the shock. There in- 
deed they lie in the misty North, volcanic 
and destroying powers which any hour may 
release, and yet from day to day and month to 
month they wait unchallenged, and the enemy 
blows are directed and dealt against less formid- 
able adversaries. They rain with desperate 
violence against men whose profession was 
never that of arms, who nevertheless, were 
they offered a fair field and no favour, would 
prove themselves more than a match for their 
assailants. Unsustained by the exhilaration of 
battle, defenceless, and in single, far-separated 
ships, their part in the drama offers few attrac- 
tions. There are enviable occupations, no 
doubt, even in war, but who would choose the 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 49 

part of a running target for enemy shells and 
torpedoes ? 

It is natural to enquire how far 
Admiral Mahan's pronouncement on com- 
merce destruction is true to-day. " The 
harassment and distress caused to a country 
by serious interference with its commerce will 
be conceded by all. It is doubtless a most 
important secondary operation of naval war, 
and is not likely to be abandoned till war 
itself shall cease : but regarded as a primary 
and fundamental measure, sufficient in itself 
to crush an enemy, it is probably a delusion, 
when presented in the fascinating garb of 
cheapness to the representatives of a people. 
Especially is it misleading when the nation 
against whom it is directed possesses, as 
Great Britain did and does, the two requisites 
of a strong sea power — a wide-spread healthy 
commerce and a powerful Navy." Has the 
advent of the submarine fundamentally altered 
the situation ? " No," we may answer with 
confidence, if the rules of international law 
be observed. If these be thrown aside there 
remains, until the event decides, room for 
much argument. 

To the most casual observer it seems now 

D 



50 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

obvious enough that the vulnerable point in 
the formidable pov^er of the Alliance opposed 
to Germany lay in the length and character 
of its sea communications. But the German 
Higher Command, soldiers most of them, 
took long to realise it. Land power 
must out-match sea pov^er, they reckoned. 
" Moltke," announced the Tageblatt trium- 
phantly, " has conquered Mahan." Doubt- 
less to harass British trade was expedient, 
and it had in the plans been marked 
down for attack. High hopes were enter- 
tained of a guerre de course conducted by 
armed cruisers in distant seas. Any im- 
poverishment of the enemy is grist to the mill. 
But it was a secondary affair. And events 
proved that there was no sufficiency in it. 
When Von Spec's squadron vanished beneath 
the seas Germany applied her mind to the 
matter and perceived at length the true 
nature of the issue. Successes here and there 
could not help her. She must somehow, 
heroically or otherwise, cut the Gordian knot 
or reckon with defeat. Thus it was that 
the roles were reversed, and while Britain 
unexpectedly threw her weight into military 
operations, Germany turned her gaze sea- 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 51 

wards and sought to pluck victory from an 
element not her own. 

Dimly at first, but with growing clearness 
she perceived that from the sea the Alliance 
daily renewed its strength, that the sea was 
the source of its recuperative energy, the 
healing well ; that while the seas were open 
it would nourish as it were eternal youth, 
that the waterways were the avenues to the 
elixir vitce^ the resources of the world which 
made good even the crushing wear and tear 
of modern war. There is no better judge 
among the nations of where lie the odds in 
material things, and with faultless judgment 
she put aside any temptation that may have 
assailed her to make the heroic venture, to 
engage outright the Grand Fleet. There 
lay the irreducible factor in the situation. 
With its defeat the problem would have solved 
itself. But with Jutland that solution had 
to be abandoned, and with it the faith she 
had taught herself that in men and gunnery 
her navy was more than Britain's equal. 
Another way had to be chosen. Undefeated, 
could the Grand Fleet be circumvented ? 
Could it somehow be eliminated from the 
calculation, could a blow be dealt at the 



52 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

communications of the Alliance from which 
battleships were powerless to shield it ? In 
evasion and circumvention, she judged, lay 
the key to the unforcible lock. 

With the immense self-confidence therefore 
that marks these serfs of theory, the Germans 
drew their plan — a ruthless campaign, con- 
ducted with the same pitiless logic, the same 
patience and forethought that they were ac- 
customed to devote to their military opera- 
tions. Eluding the armed adversary, with all 
their great and remaining strength, they would 
strike at the unarmed : 

God's mercy, then, on little ships 
Who cannot iight for life. 

Were it possible, and Germany believed it 
possible, to sever Britain's sea arteries, the 
hated enemy might bleed to death, slowly, 
perhaps, but surely. She perceived the joint 
in the harness and drove in the knife. In- 
timidation was here to play its usual part. 
If horror accompanied terror so much the 
better, the world must learn what it was to 
oppose an angry and implacable Germany. 
Then, and not till then, Britain realised the 
strength and weakness of her position ; per- 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 53 

ceived at last and with many searchings of 
heart her vulnerability, and with growing 
pride the peculiar genius of her race. So 
the sea affair finally reduced itself into an 
attack upon the Allies' communications, that 
is an attack upon Britain's Merchant Marine, 
accompanied, since no less would suffice, 
with crim.e of the first magnitude. 

Casting about for weapons to be used against 
a foe unchallengable in a direct encounter 
Germany found three to her hand — the 
disguised raider, the mine, and the submarine, 
all, be it observed, prowling or furtive weapons, 
with whose stealthy assistance Germany pro- 
poses to usher in the Golden Age. With this 
new and triple-headed engine Britain was to 
be bludgeoned into submission. You desire 
to make allowances for Germany's difficulties, 
and they were many. Waive then the 
inherent defect of these engines, that two 
of them cannot be employed with humanity. 
Argue, if you like, that in the interests of 
your own people, the general interests of 
the race must be sacrificed ; that war is war, 
and that chivalrous war is a Christian ab- 
surdity. The Dark Ages would no doubt 
have described the use of the new weapons 



54 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

as savagery. In our enlightened times harsh 
phrases are inadmissable. There appears 
therefore to be need of some gentle un- 
complaining word to describe the indis- 
criminate slaughter of non-combatants, of 
humanitarian helpers on relief ships, of 
crippled wounded aboard hospital ships. Her 
errand of mercy did not save the Norwegian 
steamer Storsted, known to be carrying a cargo 
of maize for the relief of starving Belgians. 

Finally you come to Germany's dealing 
with neutrals. The world has dreamt many 
evil dreams, but this is a nightmare. You 
are at peace with a neighbouring nation. 
You find it necessary, nevertheless, to destroy 
its property. Wonderful ! You are, in fact, 
on the friendliest terms with her people, to 
whom you owe many of your essential supplies, 
but you kill them without hesitation and 
without mercy. Still more wonderful ! If 
they complain you become virtuously indig- 
nant and threaten worse things. It is past 
whooping ! Already over eight hundred 
neutral ships, all of course unarmed, have been 
done to death. These are indeed martial 
achievements. Judge of the whole by a part 
of the most dolorous history in the records of 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 55 

civilisation. " Norway," said the National 
mdende in April 191 7, "has lost since the 
beginning of the war one-third of her mer- 
cantile marine, and about three hundred of 
her sailors, and is now losing five lives daily 
and an average of two ships, valued at two 
million kroner." Denmark has lost 150 ships, 
and more than two hundred of her sailors 
have been killed. Do not mistake. It is 
all pure friendliness. As Hamlet says, " They 
but poison in jest." " Thirteen survivors of 
the crew of the Norwegian ship Medusa^ 
1023 tons, have been landed," runs the record 
of May 22, 191 7, " their vessel having been 
shelled and sunk by a German submarine. 
Seven of the thirteen were hospital cases. 
The Germans, in addition to not giving them 
any warning, continued shelling the crew 
while they were lowering the boats. The 
bursting of the shells scattered shrapnel, 
which killed two men and severely wounded 
seven others. One man had half his left 
foot blown away, and another some of his 
scalp blown off, while a third had his neck 
lacerated." 

Let us not imagine, however, that Germans 
are themselves in agreement with respect to 



56 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

this warfare. Professor Flamm of Charlot- 
tenburg is dissatisfied. In Die Woche he 
advocates sterner dealing. Fewer men of 
the crews of torpedoed vessels should be 
saved. Best of all would it be if destroyed 
neutral ships disappeared without leaving a 
trace even of wreckage. Then terror would 
strike at men's hearts. How charming a 
friend is Professor Flamm. For it is not 
enemies he desires to treat thus. It is not 
war he advocates, only an exposition of the 
German mind. Norway, Denmark, and the 
rest are enjoying the pleasures of peace. 
Perhaps learning will supply us with a new 
name for these operations. Had Germany 
begun the war, it has been well said, with 
justice on her side her conduct of it would 
long since have driven justice, a fugitive, 
to the opposite camp. Into the teeth of 
this hurricane of hate the merchant seamen 
put forth, and every hour that we watch 
from sheltered homes it is taking toll of 
their lives. Read the long list of officers 
in the service that are gone, and remember 
that beyond it lies a longer and more 
sorrowful category still of men that held 
no rank nor ever thought of fame ; en- 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 57 

gineers and deck hands, boys and stokers, 
so that in the fishing villages from north to 
south the tiniest mourns its unreturning dead. 
Of the raiders, so far as it has been written, 
we know the record. The sea is wide, and one 
might almost as well look for an escaped bird 
in the forest as for a single ship in any ocean. 
They have had their victims ; fifty of our 
merchantmen were seized or sunk before the 
first phase ended with the battle of the Falk- 
lands and the destruction of Von Spee. There 
were, of course, escapes and adventures, like 
that of the Pacific Steam Navigation cargo 
vessel and her conversation with Karlsruhe^ 
which had information of her position and 
sent out a wireless signal asking for the 
latitude and longitude. The operator, in- 
structed by the captain, sceptical soul, refused 
the friendly suggestion. The polite enemy 
retorted, " English schweinhund. This is 
German warship, Karlsruhe, we will you find." 
But the night set in thick with misty rain, 
and though only a few miles distant the 
English ship, heedless of angry signals, slipped 
away and escaped. The subsequent disguised 
commerce raiders could only creep at long 
intervals and under colours not their own, 



58 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

through the patrols, in rain or snow storms, 
by circuitous routes and through territorial 
waters. Meteor, under the Russian flag, was 
rounded up, deserted, and destroyed by her 
own crew. Berlin driven into Trondhjem 
and interned. Greif, disguised as a Nor- 
wegian ship, perished in the encounter 
with Alcantara, 

Of these ventures, one may say, that 
they repeated tactics familiar in all our 
wars ; tactics which never yet turned the 
scale or threatened to turn it. Consider 
now the far more serious menace of the 
submarine and mine. These were weapons 
indeed not altogether novel, the novelty lay 
in the scale and ruthless manner of their 
employment ; and the ruthless policy once 
launched, three things, at first but dimly 
distinguishable amid the confusion of so 
vast a conflict, took shape and form. First, 
that the war, however long the decision 
might be postponed, had entered upon its 
final and decisive stage. Second, that the full 
strength and pressure of the attack would 
now be transferred from the Royal Navy 
to the Mercantile Marine ; and third that 
upon its tenacity and powers of endurance 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 59 

depended not the destiny of Britain alone 
but that of the world. It was to be a conflict 
grim and great, suited to the stupendous 
consequences which hung upon the issue, a 
conflict without the dramatic and inspiring 
incidents of engagements between embattled 
fleets, of monotonous, almost featureless, 
repetitions of the same gruesome story, in 
which the enemy trusted to the accumulated 
effect of a blow dealt again and again, and 
yet again, in hardly varying circumstances, 
reducing with each successful effort the 
maritime resources upon which the fortunes 
of the Alliance were absolutely staked. 
Britain's capital — ^who is now unaware of 
it ? — is her shipping, and the drain upon 
that capital, the ceaseless call upon this 
bank of national security, could not fail if 
unarrested to compass her ruin. Britain, 
and with Britain her allies, would succumb 
to a series of stabs in the back. 

How is one to account for the success of 
the submarine campaign ? The answer is 
that Britain was not prepared for it. Why 
was she not prepared ? For no other reason 
than that it was unthinkable. It is as if a 
respectable curate of your acquaintance were 



6o THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

to whip out a revolver and demand your 
purse. You are taken by surprise, for you 
had not thought these things possible in 
your neighbourhood, and particularly not to 
be expected from a clergyman. The world 
did not anticipate the new code of morals, 
more especially from a people of culture. 
It simplifies the business of the highwayman 
if you have believed him to be an evangelist. 
Deceived by the spectacles and the missionary 
manner, Britain left her merchant ships 
unarmed, and was quite unprovided with 
mines or any other defensive machinery for 
her traders. 

By the law and custom of the nations 
merchant vessels must not be destroyed 
at sea but brought into port, and become 
prizes of war only if condemned after a 
judicial enquiry. From the first these pro- 
visions of international law were thrown 
aside by Germany. That they had existed, 
that civilisation had trusted, and that she 
herself had endorsed them gave her a mag- 
nificent advantage. She took advantage — 
the most hideous form of depravity — of the 
world's growth in goodness. It was felt, 
however, that something might be pardoned 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 6i 

to an enemy in sore straits, and even Britain 
made no angry complaint. Having discarded 
civilised usage as regards property, and dis- 
carded it in vain, the temptation assailed her 
to descend another step and disregard con- 
siderations of humanity. At first, as one 
knows, the crews and passengers of torpedoed 
ships were given a chance to escape death. 
Then, reaching the lowest rung of the 
malevolent ladder, Germany bowed farewell 
to her last scruple. 

Facilis descensus Averni, Free yourself 
from restraint, lay aside obligations moral 
and legal, and for the destruction of com- 
merce you have in the submarine a weapon 
without equal, an immoral inspiration. 
Unaware that the world had outgrown 
moralsi that chivalry was wholly out of date, 
Britain taken aback had, it may be confessed, 
no ready or immediate answer, and it seemed, 
indeed, as if the new instrument possessed 
qualities unanswerable, borrowed from the 
region of fable. Only in fables does one put 
on at will the mantle of invisibility or don 
invulnerable armour. To see without being 
seen ; to cover yourself with a garment upon 
which blows fall in vain — these powers suggest 



62 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

magic or dealings with the infernal world. 
How is an enemy to be resisted who can attack 
unexpectedly and, if threatened, vanish like 
a dream ? Each of our merchant vessels, it 
has been said, it like an unarmed man walking 
down a dark lane infested with armed high- 
waymen. 

Carrying thirty or forty of a crew, 
armed with a gun for surface fighting, and 
that terrible and devastating weapon, the 
torpedo, for the secret offensive, capable of 
an under-water speed — 8 to lo knots — 
equal to, and a surface speed of i8 to 
20 knots — far in excess of the average 
trader ; with a radius of action extending to 
three or four thousand miles, and the capacity 
of remaining at sea for months at a time, 
one need feel no surprise that the world 
rings with the performances of this sub- 
mersible cruiser. The torpedo is in itself 
a mechanism of uncanny quality ; nothing 
else than a small vessel, costing ;^iooo to 
build, it moves with a speed of 40 knots, 
is propelled by its own engines, and directed 
by its own steering gear. Effective at any 
range under 10,000 yards, given position at 
the range of a couple of miles it may easily 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 63 

kill ; at a mile it kills infallibly. Supply 
your merchantmen with guns and you drive 
the submarine to shelter, but you do not 
disarm it, and though it must manoeuvre for 
position to discharge a successful torpedo, if 
the missile take effect, a single shot usually 
suffices. The German submarine hates the 
gun behind which stands a British crew, and 
prefers the warfare in which blow cannot 
be returned for blow. No Briton dislikes a 
fair fight, or doubts of his success in it, but a 
warfare in which he can neither see nor 
retaliate upon the foe, in which his hands 
are tied, strikes his simple and uncultured 
mind as cowardly. There is nothing for it 
but to run away, and for running away 
Britons are by nature little adapted. 

Of the capital expended by Germany on 
this campaign fifteen or twenty millions at 
least already lie in the ocean depths ; but 
side by side with these millions lies the 
uncounted wealth of the slaughtered ships 
and cargoes. Only when we perceive the 
true character of the weapon and the fury 
of the campaign can the endurance and 
achievements of the merchant sailor emerge 
for us into the full sunshine of their splendour. 



64 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

Examine the matter coolly and one sees 
that the submarine owes its success as much to 
its novelty as to its inherent capacities. The 
limitations and defects are as obvious as the 
qualities. Virtually powerless on the surface 
against armed vessels of high speed like 
destroyers, completely submerged it has 
hearing indeed, but not sight. It can obtain 
little or no knowledge of the drift of current 
and tide and is blind to surrounding dangers. 
Above water it can be rammed or shelled, 
below it can be netted or mined. Strange 
things have happened to it at the hands of 
ingenious skippers. Anchors have rudely 
disturbed its repose when nestling in the 
sand, and an enterprising seaman has been 
known to leap aboard a rising vessel, lay 
about him with a hammer, smash the periscope 
tube, and deprive the aggrieved monster, like 
another Polyphemus, of his single eye. 
Against observation or attack from the air, 
too, the submarine is wholly without defence. 
It is incapable of descending to great depths 
and rarely dives lower than 50 feet. The 
dirigible or hydroplane poised above it is 
master of the situation, can discover its 
presence at a great depth, and with ease and 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 65 

perfect security destroy it, either when it 
emerges or even by means of explosives below 
the surface. 

" Spotting " is everything, for once spotted 
there is little hope for the monster. A signal 
calls to his lair the neighbouring patrols, and 
surrounded by a swarm of hostile craft he 
is quickly given the choice of ascending to 
surrender or descending for ever. To this 
mastery the comparative freedom of the 
English Channel from submarine depredations 
is largely due. Life aboard such a craft is 
not without its terrors and bad moments, 
while it creeps through channels where the 
water is shoal or puts up its periscope in an 
unlucky spot. We may be sure that black 
care sits in the cabin with the crew, a justified 
uneasiness. The end may be very sudden, 
and of a kind one hardly likes to think of. 
Mistakes — and mistakes with half-trained 
crews are inevitable — bring quick disaster. 
The deep-sea pirates aboard super-submarines 
operating on the trade routes have lighter 
hearts no doubt than those engaged in the 
narrow seas, but exits and entrances are not 
without peril, as the North Sea depths could 
reveal. Yet their work goes forward, and the 



66 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

last sentences of this barbaric sea history are 
not yet written. 

What of the defence in this crafty and 
lawless war, and what counter measures have 
been taken ? Apart from the continual 
patrolling of dangerous areas and the vigilant 
anti-submarine warfare conducted by the 
warders of the sea routes, the secrets of which 
none may reveal, broadly stated, the only 
present reply to torpedo attacks consists in 
some form of evasion. A thousand busy 
brains are at work, but were an answer dis- 
covered to-day how many months would be 
needed to prepare and supply the necessary 
gear to some three or four thousand ships ? 

Meanwhile traffic instructions form a separ- 
ate and highly developed section of Admiralty 
work. Shipping Intelligence officers, at the 
ports, in close conjunction with the Customs 
Officers issue route orders, varying with the 
needs of the hour, to each British ship out- 
ward bound. To neutrals advice is tendered. 
Orders for homeward-bound vessels are now 
issued at foreign ports in the Western hemi- 
sphere or elsewhere by the Consular officers, 
assisted by men of sea-faring experience 
specially instructed. In addition^ masters 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 67 

have every precise schooling in the arts of 
avoiding hostile craft. That these arts have 
their value experience proves, and of the 
various devices zigzagging has been found 
perhaps the most effective. The attacking 
submarine sights her prospective prey and 
notes the course. She then manoeuvres to 
bring her torpedo-tubes to bear, and sub- 
merges. But the helm on the approaching 
vessel is meanwhile put over to port or 
starboard and the favourable position is lost. 
Reduced in speed and turning power by 
submersion, the submarine commander is 
thrown out. Again he manoeuvres for position 
but finds his target has again shifted her helm 
and escaped him. Zigzagging, however, adds 
materially to the length of the voyage, and 
naturally the delay is cordially disliked by 
skippers. A temptation naturally assails men 
of their breed to make a dash for it. Time, 
too, is always a consideration, and the risks 
to a vessel of less than 10 knots speed are 
not appreciably diminished by its adoption. 
For an 8-knot boat, and many of the 
most valuable traders can hardly attain a 
greater pace, the increase in the length of 
the voyage and the time involved balance or 



68 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

eliminate the advantage of this and other 
palliatives. In the nature of the case there 
can be no immediate remedy for the disease. 
Merchant ships — that is the root of the 
trouble — are not built to resist torpedoes. 
Possibly such ships might be built, possibly 
a cure for this sea malady may yet be found. 
But to combat a new plague or pestilence 
the physician must have time to study the 
devastating organism and its peculiar pro- 
perties. The study proceeds. The arming 
of merchantmen, a preliminary and successful 
measure, was necessary to drive the U-boat 
below the surface. There, capable only of 
torpedo attack, it loses half its observing, 
half its striking powers. But the true defence 
is a vigorous offensive, which is the business 
not of merchantmen but of patrol and fighting 
ships. They are at work in daily-increasing 
numbers, they employ new and ingenious 
devices, they are happy and confident. But 
the veil is never lifted. A deep, gloomy, 
mysterious silence prevails. Where her sub- 
marines are lost, how they are lost Germany 
is ignorant. Each goes forth on its mission, 
with uncertainty at the prow and misgiving 
at the helm. All the enemy knows is that 



SEA WARFARE : THE NEW STYLE 69 

vessel after vessel fails to return, that they 
run like sand through the fingers. 

How many submarines does Germany pos- 
sess ? Probably, including the mine-layers, 
the number does not much, if at all, exceed 
two hundred, and of these only a proportion 
can be at sea in any given week or month, 
perhaps a third. Submarines, despite Ger- 
many's boasts, her favourite psychological 
weapon, cannot be built in a day nor yet a 
month, and crews are worse than useless with 
less than half a year's training. The end is 
not in sight, but the barometer of hope must 
already be falling fast. " If the submarine 
attack against England be defeated," said 
Herr Ballin, "it will be a miracle, and I do 
not believe in miracles." One looks forward 
with interest to the conversion of Herr Ballin 
to a less sceptical theology. His philosophical 
countrymen will, no doubt, supply him with 
the necessary metaphysic. 

As for ourselves and our lack of foresight 
in this matter, let us not be too critical. We 
misjudged human nature, that is all. We 
believed some species of it were extinct. 
We believed there were things of which white 
men were not capable. For this noble error, 



70 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

and it was noble, we pay the price, and are 
not without compensation. Since none can 
judge of a vessel's seaworthiness in harbour, 
none can judge of the spirit of a man or race 
until it encounters the storm. And if again 
the superb courage and shining of the British 
sailor has been proved, if we have been 
reminded that as a nation with him we stand 
or fall, we may be magnanimous, and return 
polite thanks to an enemy that has made 
these things clear, who has liberated yet again 
the flashing spirit of liberty. The stars still 
shine for us above the wild weather of the 
world. 



THE MINE-FISHERS 

In any weather 
They flock'd together, 
Birds of a feather, 

Through Dover Strait ; 

The seas that kiss'd her 
Brought tramp or drifter 
From ports that miss'd her 
In flag and freight ; 

Trawler and whaler 
And deep-sea sailor. 
They would not fail her 
At danger's gate. 

Almost before a gun had spoken the fishermen 
rallied to their country's aid. Some few 
indeed were off the Danish coast or far 
North, Iceland way, unconscious that a more 
feverish business than fishing had begun, and 
heard the astonishing news only on their 
return from waters already troubled. Which 
of us knows anything of this community or 
thought it essential to our naval efficiency ? 

71 



72 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

Yet if anywhere the spirit of personal inde- 
pendence survives, they cherish it these men, 
Britons to the bone, v^edded to freedom since 
their ancestors came in their long galleys out 
of the North-east to harry the Saxon farmers. 
Take English and Scotch together and you 
may number the East Coast fishermen at a 
hundred thousand, and their ships, trawlers 
and drifters, accustomed to voyage to the 
Polar ice or the White Sea, at some three 
thousand six hundred. Of these perhaps four 
hundred of the slower and more ancient craft, 
the lame ducks of the flotillas, some of 
them of outlandish type and antiquated gear, 
manned by boys and men past service in the 
wars, still drag their trawls or lie to their 
nets to keep the markets supplied. Since 
80 per cent, of our spoils of the sea go abroad 
in normal times, the home supplies can be 
maintained by the reduced fleet. The rest, 
over three thousand, steamers and rare sea- 
boats all, are in national employ, often with 
their crews complete and handled by the 
skippers who know them, proud warrant 
officers now in His Majesty's fleet, and work- 
ing for the most part in groups commanded 
by some lieutenant of the Royal Naval Reserve, 



THE MINE-FISHERS 73 

a Commodore, in his way, with a squadron 
admirals might envy. Many of the fisher 
folk belonged to the Reserve and joined the 
fighting fleets, and practically all of military 
age are long since involved in the sea affair. 
Two things belong to the story — these men, 
whether of Grimsby or Hull, Cardiff or Leith, 
or any other of the great centres, were 
volunteers, and assess their motives for what 
you will, it was not the Government wage 
that brought them. Their fellows, old men, 
still on the fishing grounds, do a thriving 
business compared with that for which the 
Government pays its few shillings a day. 
It is well that the country should know that 
the work for which no gold can pay was not 
undertaken for gold, and that they have held 
on as mine-sweepers when as fishermen they 
would have lain snugly in harbour. '' If 
there have been frozen feet in the trenches 
there have been frozen fingers on the sea," 
says one. " Fifteen hours of drenching and 
buffeting were our portion that day. The 
vessel with the pull of the tackle and the drive 
of the engines keeping her like a half-tide 
rock, never clear of sweeping seas. Thud, 
slap, crash and swish as they came over our 



74 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

bows and swirled along the deck, never ceas- 
ing." They were needed, every man of them. 
For it happened that in this most civilised 
warfare machines were employed with which, 
search the world round for them, no other 
men could effectively deal. But for their 
never-resting labours the seas about these 
islands would have been as impassable for 
ships as a tropical forest for a motor car. 
Let us open our eyes and acknowledge the 
grandiosity of the German mind, the spacious- 
ness of its schemes. It is not characteristic 
of Germany to do things by halves, and the 
simple may well be amazed at the grandeur 
of her mine-laying campaign. 

No country can teach Germany anything 
on this subject. She is sole mistress of the 
black art. Before the outbreak of war she 
had put her mind to it and possessed vessels 
built to carry 500 mines, fitted with special 
and ingenious mechanisms for lowering and 
floating them. When her surface ships were 
driven from the seas her resources were not 
exhausted, and a fleet of mine-laying sub- 
marines continues the business with mag- 
nificent industry. No one will ever write a 
song on " The Mariners of Germany," for 



THE MINE-FISHERS 75 

the German is not a sailor. Nor has he ever 
understood the code of honour which prevails 
upon the sea. But as an engineer he has 
perhaps few equals, and in so far as engineering 
skill applied to ships can go you will do well 
to reckon with him. 

As for his mines themselves, they are of 
many patterns, strange sea-beasts with " all 
manner of horns and of humps." " There 
are some kinds," says the author of " In 
the Northern Mists," " that have horns 
— like a dilemma ; and any logician will 
tell you that a dilemma is a very dangerous 
thing for the inexperienced to handle. It is 
better not to break the horns of the ungodly 
in this case, for when the horns are broken 
the mine explodes. Some are arranged to 
come up to the surface long after they are 
hidden in the depths, and at unexpected 
times, like regrettable incidents from a hectic 
past. Others are constructed with a fiendish 
ingenuity to wait after touching a ship until 
they have felt out its most vulnerable part 
before exploding. Some are made to float 
about at random, as a malevolent wit flings 
about his spiteful jests, caring not whom he 
wounds. And others, more dangerous still, 



76 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

drift when they were meant to remain 
anchored ; and then, when they are cast up 
on the German coasts, our enemy is ever 
ready to describe them as English mines — 
never German, mark you. But it is a rascally 
people, that cares nothing for the difference 
between meum and tuum. The task of sweep- 
ing for all these different brands of tinned 
doom is almost as great as that of the old 
lady in the nursery rhyme, whose job it was to 
sweep the cobwebs out of the sky. The labour 
of Sisyphus was child's play compared to it." 

Conceived then in the magnificent style, 
elaborated with curious subtlety, representing 
meticulous and anxious thought the purpose 
was no less than to convert the waters fre- 
quented by Allied shipping into a broad field 
of death. The magnitude of the conception 
fascinates one. Had it been understood, as 
it has not been understood, the timid might 
have had less sleep o' nights ; but they slept 
untroubled, and none save those whose anxious 
charge it was to counter the campaign can 
judge or form any estimate of its far-reaching 
and devilish audacity. 

It has been, let us bear in mind, not an 
occasional but a continuous menace, and 



THE MINE-FISHERS 77 

threatens us still. Day and night mines are 
freely sown — a patch here and a patch there 
— steadily, persistently. " They grow like 
daisies," some one has said, '^ cut down in the 
afternoon, they are up again next morning." 
Let the sweepers work how they will the end 
is never in sight. Mines have been laid from 
the Cape to the West Indies ; from Archangel 
to the Dardanelles ; off every Allied port ; 
in every navigable channel ; on every avenue 
of approach to these islands from the ocean 
or the narrow sea. Strewn with a lavishness 
that counts no cost too heavy, they represent 
an expenditure that runs to many millions. 
In one area alone more than a thousand mines 
have been destroyed by our sweepers. No 
more necessary, no more exhausting, no more 
hazardous work than theirs is done to-day in 
any waters. 

Let it not be supposed that these admirable 
activities involve a careless or haphazard 
disposal of the destructive charges. Each has 
been laid in accordance with a calculated 
plan and with definite intention. There is a 
method in this madness. Take a single in- 
stance : in certain areas mines are laid time 
and again to deflect the stream of traffic into 



78 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

a channel where submarines may act with 
comparative impunity from danger. The 
game is played so that the pawn, endeavouring 
to escape capture by the knight falls a victim 
to the castle. These thoughtful contrivances 
demand thoughtful answers, and result in an 
encounter of wits such as the world will 
probably never see again upon the chequer- 
board of the seas. But not wits alone are 
sufficient, and the pieces in the game are 
numerous. Bear in mind that the area of 
the North Sea alone is greater than Germany. 
It is not a case for the employment of twenty 
or fifty or a hundred vessels. One can form 
some picture of such activities. But what are 
the actual numbers ? On the British side 
some 1700 ships and 25,000 men concentrate 
their activities on sweeping for mines. The 
mind staggers at the immensity of the thing. 
Is anyone surprised that German confidence 
stands high ; that it believed no answer was 
possible ; that it had as good right to believe 
in the success of these battalions of explosives 
as in German artillery and German armies ? 

In the early days mines were directed 
against our fighting fleet, to endanger their 
excursions in the North Sea, or to fetter 



THE MINE-FISHERS 79 

their movements in pursuit of hostile vessels. 
To protect the fleet, mine-sweepers, specially 
constructed, or old gunboats, built some of 
them as early as 1887, manned throughout 
by naval ratings, kept, unknown to the public 
— whose gaze was concentrated upon the 
trawlers and drifters — a vigil unimaginable 
in its range and exhausting in its intensity. 
Their work continues ; but the jackals, 
baulked of nobler prey, changed their hunting 
ground and laid still more numerous traps 
for less wary creatures — the traders. They, 
too, however, are learning caution. There 
is a certain region through which, since the 
war began, 38,000 trading vessels have 
voyaged ; in which no more than four have 
been destroyed by mines. Weigh these facts 
and consider the compliment that fits the 
achievement. 

If you ask by what methods the German 
mines are safely garnered you will be 
told that the trawlers sweep in pairs ; a 
method which seems to have advantages 
over that of the enemy. Pursue your enquiry 
and you will learn that they are less dangerous 
at high than at low water ; that floating mines 
since they are easily pushed aside, and explode 



8o THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

to expend their force largely in the vacant 
air, are less of a danger than the anchored 
type ; that when brought to the surface 
gun or rifle fire disposes of them at a safe 
distance ; that there are other little things 
to be found when fishing. '^ Last month, 
when nearly completing the sweeping, I 
swept up five mines and came across five full 
petrol tanks, each holding about fifty-one 
gallons or more, which appeared as if they 
had been moored." 

When you have gathered these facts from 
an authority, the conversation lapses into 
generalities. It is useless to display an eager- 
ness for knowledge — the book is closed. For 
the curious it may be added, however, that 
mine-fishing is an art, considerably more 
complicated than baiting a hook or throwing 
a fly ; that some men are fishers by nature 
and others, despite experience, remain clumsy ; 
that the wriggle and the tug and the play of 
the fish are part of the sport, that the amuse- 
ment is not unaccompanied by danger, and 
that good fishermen are not easy to replace. 
With these suggestions the matter stands 
adjourned sine die — that is, till the end of 
the war. 



THE MINE-FISHERS 8i 

Mine-sweepers are of course protected, for 
the sympathetic mind will understand that 
a submarine which has just laid traps re- 
sents their removal. Like the ghost of the 
murderer, its habit is to haunt the region 
of its labours. For trading with these 
gentry the fishers have their own methods, 
sometimes more primitive and courageous 
than effective, as when the master of a 
sailing craft — it is fact, not fiction — fancied 
himself a 40-knot destroyer and tried to 
ram the enemy. Unarmed audacity occasion- 
ally, indeed, achieves miracles. One gunless 
trawler, by persistent ill-mannered harrassing 
pursuit, so terrified a German commander 
who was attacking a merchant vessel, that 
his quarry escaped. Submarine hunting in 
armed craft is, of course, another matter and 
accounted the greatest of all great games. 
Sea-going Britons pine for it with an 
inextinguishable longing. Lowestoft mine- 
sweepers hanker after leave not to spend 
by the fireside but on this brave sport. 
Volunteers jostle each other for the service. 
Admirals previously on the retired list renew 
in it all the zest and vigour of their youth. 
Alas, that after the war a pursuit which out- 

F 



82 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

bids in popularity tiger-shooting or steeple- 
chasing should come to an untimely end. 

Another submarine habit is with infinite, 
untiring Teutonic patience to do the work 
over again in the wake of the sweepers, for 
which amiable procedure there is no cure 
save an equal and opposite persistence. Yet 
another is to lay little mines nearer the 
surface to catch trawlers engaged in fishing 
for bigger ones placed deeper for larger ships. 
Oh excellent, persevering, and philanthropic 
Teuton 1 

No one in the world can teach trawler or 
drifter men, who spend less than a month 
ashore in the twelve, seamanship. " Smooth 
sea and storm sea " is alike to them. Grey, 
tumbling waters are their winter portion, 
decks continually awash, frozen gear, in- 
tolerable motion. Watch that short bluff 
little vessel loo miles from any port and a 
gale rising, with her high bows staggering 
up from the hollow of the wave that hid 
her from sight, streaming from rail to rail, 
to plunge headlong into the next hollow, 
climb up the approaching mountain to en- 
counter the smothering crest, shake herself 
and disappear again into the turbid water 



THE MINE-FISHERS 83 

between the bigger seas. You will see no one 
on deck save the unconcerned man at the wheel 
in oilskins and sea-boots, in whom the turmoil 
produces no emotion. That wild sky and 
furious sea are familiar acquaintances of his, 
that waif of a boat rolling and pitching through 
it is his home. Skald to the Viking's son I 
Mine-fishing to men of this stamp was merely 
a variation in the ordinary way of business. 
Of course the danger was vastly greater, but 
they were inured to danger. Against shelling 
they have a prejudice, for mines they care 
nothing, and among those still at their old 
trade the Admiralty prohibition against fishing 
in mine-fields — a prohibition constantly dis- 
regarded — creates perhaps as much resentment 
as the German sowing of them. Good brooms 
they make these broad-beamed, bluff-bowed 
vessels, and life-preservers no less. To their 
presence in the North Sea and elsewhere 
thousands already owe their lives. Twenty 
miles off Tory Island a trawler picked up the 
survivors from the Manchester Commerce ; 
another, the Coriander^ saved 150 of the men 
from Cressy and Hogue ; still another brought 
home fifty men of the ill-fated Hazvke ; the 
Daisy rescued twenty men from the destroyer 



84 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

Recruit. In the Mediterranean the North 
Sea men were ubiquitous. In answer to 
distress signals they appeared as if by magic. 
" Ultimately," \^TOte one of the passengers 
on the ill-fated Arabia, '' I was put aboard a 
trawler on which were about i66 rescued. 
. . . We had few wraps, and most of us lay 
till we reached ]\Ialta in drenched clothes. 
They were thirty-seven hours of utter misery 
. . . More than half the sundvors on the 
trawler were women and children." 

Drudgery, and monotonous drudgery, it 
all is ; relieved, if you find it relief, that any 
moment may see the end of you and your 
ship. Here is the process. " A deck hand 
came up the ladder and handed up two 
pneumatic lifebelts. The Captain silently 
passed one to me. After we had fastened 
them securely he glanced at the chart and 
compass. Then he gave a command and a 
signal was flashed to the other boat. Thus 
the first preparation was made for our * fish- 
ing.' The other boat nosed easily alongside. 
There was a clanking of machinery and she 
made off again, carrying one end of a hea\7' 
steel cable. Several hundred yards away she 
resumed her course, while the cable sagged 



THE MINE-FISHERS 85 

far dovra beneath the surface of the water. 
That was all — we were sw^eeping. ... It 
was late in the afternoon when we made 
our first catch. A sudden tightening of the 
cable made it clear that we had hit an obstruc- 
tion. There was just a slight tremor all 
through the boat. Everybody stepped to 
the rail and gazed intently into the water. 
' That'll be one,' said the commander as the 
cable relaxed. Sure enough it was ' one.' 
The Boche mine broke the surface of the 
water and floated free, her moorings of i-inch 
steel cut oS as cleanly as if with a mighty 
pair of shears. As it rolled lazily in the swell 
it reminded me of a great black turtle \vith 
spikes on its back." Such is the normal 
procedure, and a rifle bullet does the rest. 
'* There was an explosion that made our teeth 
rattle, while a huge volume of black smoke 
belched upward into the still air. And a 
shining column of water shot straight up 
through the black cloud to a height of 50 
or 60 feet. . . . Then the water poured 
back through the smoke and the grim cloud 
drifted off over the waste of the North Sea." 
If you pursue your search for incidents 
you may meet something of this type. The 



86 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

gear of the trawler Pelican was just being 
hove in when a mine was discovered entangled 
in the warp. The winch was stopped just 
as the mine bumped — anxious moment— -the 
ship's side. Any lurch meant an explosion 
and certain destruction. The skipper ordered 
all hands into the boat and to pull away. 
Remaining alone on board, with infinite care 
he worked to clear the mine, gently, very 
gently, unwinding the gear of the winch. 
The men lay on their oars at a safe distance 
and waited in suspense. At last the mine 
was released and the skipper cautiously paid 
out 120 fathoms of line. Hardly was it done 
when, having touched something, the devil- 
fish exploded, shaking the trawler from stem 
to stern and half-filling the distant boat with 
water. When the warp was hauled on board 
it revealed nothing but a mass of wreckage. 

If you are in search of adventure on board 
a mine-sweeper and are in luck you may enjoy 
the excitement of an aeroplane attack, with 
bombs dropping around you from the over- 
head circling enemy, or machine-gun bullets 
rattling on the deck from a German battle- 
plane. Or again an angry submarine 
commander rising out of the deep may send 



THE MINE-FISHERS 87 

a shell or two your way. For the rest it is 
a peaceful life, and if you escape the attentions 
of all these death-deahng devices, mine, 
aeroplane and submarine, you may arrive 
home safe enough. The odds are probably 
somewhat in your favour, but the mathe- 
maticians have not worked out the table of 
chances. You may have the best of it and 
secure quite a number of mines, or one of 
the enemy devices may secure you. You 
never can tell. Here is a transcript. 

" It was about four in the morning. This 
time of year. Just such darkness as this. The 
London Girl came down on my port side. . . . 
I opened the door (of the deck-house) to hear 
what she had to say. 'Don't go near so- 
and-so,' her old man shouted. 'What's 
that ? ' I said. ' Don't go,' he hailed—' so- 
and-so — some mines adrift.' That's all. I 
was just backing into the wheel-house again 
when there was a flash and a roar. He'd 
gone. Not enough left afloat to make a 
platter. That's it. There's five boats in 
line astern of you one minute. There's a 
bright Hght, and when you look back there's 
only four. It ain't the mines you see that's 
the worry. I've seen hundreds. It's the 



88 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

beggar you can't see. Never know when it's 
under your forefoot. Dirty game, like, I 
call it. No sense in it. Sinking ships. 
Any ships. I'd never have believed it. Don't 
know what's come over the world." Most of 
us are in like case. Only the knights of the 
German Round Table, those idealist seekers 
after grace and loveliness, know and in good 
time, perhaps, will take the rest of the world 
into their confidence. 

Against mines you cannot retaliate, but 
against the U-boat you can occasionally hit 
back. " A number of trawlers," writes a 
correspondent, " were fishing off Aberdeen 
on a fairly stormy day when a submarine 
came to the surface and commenced firing 
at the trawlers, making for one in particular — 
the Strathearn. The Strathearn ran for it, 
pursued by the submarine. While the shots 
were falling round, some of the crew shouted 
to Geordie, the skipper, " Geordie, get the 
boat out.' Said Geordie, ' I'll see you in 
h — ^11 first ! Fire up ! If she's gaun doon, 
I'm gaun doon. Fire up ! I think we hae 
a chance.' 

" During this time Geordie was making 
towards another trawler, the Commissioner 



THE MINE-FISHERS 89 

(armed), which had her gear down and seemed 
totally unconcerned. But, as soon as the 
Strathearn passed her, and there was nothing 
betvv^een the submarine and herself, a blow 
with an axe cut her gear away, she swung 
round, and at the same moment her gun 
appeared. 

"Her first shot missed the submarine, so 
did the second ; the third hit the enemy's 
conning tower, a fourth hit the enemy's gun, 
and the fifth sent the submarine down in 
flames, and all was over, bar the shouting." 

Our Allies could bear witness to the work 
of British mine-sweepers and patrols in the 
Mediterranean. In one raid Austrian cruisers 
and destroyers attacked the patrol line in 
the Adriatic and sank fourteen of our drifters. 
Our fishermen have swept for mines off 
Russian, French and Italian ports, and of 
their work at the Dardanelles all the world 
has heard. Captain Woodgate of the Koorah 
has vividly described an episode in which 
he was himself the protagonist. 

" When we were up in the Dardanelles 
there were what we call three groups — One, 
Two and Three — each group had to go up, 
one at a time. The vessel I was in belonged 



90 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

to the second group. The night we were 
going to make the final dash in the Dardan- 
elles, up in the Narrows, we went, no lights 
up, everything covered in. They let us 
get right up to the Narrows, and as we turned 
round to take our sweeps up one of our 
number was blown up. Then they peppered 
us from each side, from one and a half to 
two miles. We heard cries for help. I 
said, ' We shall have to do the best we can, 
and go back and pick up.' There was no 
waiting, no saying, ' Who shall go ? ' As 
soon as I called for volunteers three jumped 
in. I kept the vessel as close as I could to 
shelter them. I did not think any would 
come back alive, but they did come back. 
No one was hit, and I said, ' Now we'll get 
the boat in.' Just as we got the boat nicely 
clear of the water, along came a shot and 
knocked it in splinters. I shouted, ' All 
hands keep under cover as much as you can,' 
and I got on the bridge, and we went full 
steam ahead. I could not tell you what it 
was like, with floating and sunken mines and 
shots everywhere. We got knocked about, 
the mast almost gone, rigging gone, and she 
was riddled right along the starboard side. 



THE MINE-FISHERS 91 

One of the hands we picked up had his left 
arm smashed with shrapnel ; that was all 
the injury we got. When we got out the 
commander came alongside and said, ' Have 
you seen any more trawlers ? ' I said, ' Yes, 
we've got the crew of one on board, the 
Manx Hero.'' We were the last out, and I 
can tell you I never want to see such a sight 
again. ... I thought of the three men in 
the fiery furnace, how they were preserved, 
and of Daniel in the lion's den, and I think 
of the twenty-four of us coming out under 
that terrible fire and the water covered with 
floating and sunken mines." 

" There's one good thing about it," re- 
marked a skipper who had his second vessel 
blown up under him, " you take it calmer 
the second time." We thought we knew 
the metal of these men. We did, but we 
know it better now. Eighty of these skippers 
have been killed in action, many have been 
blown up more than once, and several, 
among them that celebrity " Submarine 
Billy," have had three such elevating experi- 
ences. But it makes no difference. They 
go to sea again. One hardly knows what to 
make of this type of human being. Perhaps 



92 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

the British race has no monopoly in it, but 
one wonders. Take the case of the Gowanlee, 
a drifter, summoned to surrender by an 
Austrian cruiser in the Adriatic. The 
skipper's answer, in the vein of Sir Richard 
Grenville, rejoicing in the monstrous odds 
against him, was to call for three cheers and 
to engage the cruiser with one six-pounder, 
the only gun he had. That gun, served by 
a deck hand with a shattered leg, continued 
to fire till the skipper brought his vessel out 
of the encounter with his flag flying. What 
praise is equal to this spirit ? Let an expert 
speak. The commander of a destroyer, whose 
testimonial, if any testimonials are required, 
has value. 

" Only a quarter of an hour before the 
Admiral had wished me a pleasant trip. 
That quarter of an hour now seemed aeons 
away. The Channel was battering us and 
bruising us. . . . To climb to the bridge 
was a perilous adventure in mountaineering. 
Here crouched three figures, swathed from 
head to heel like Polar explorers. The glass 
of the wind-screen was sweating and trickling 
like the window of a railway carriage. From 
time to time the Captain wiped clear patches 



THE MINE-FISHERS 93 

with the finger of his fur glove and made 
very uncomplimentary remarks about the 
snow. Behind him stood the steersman, 
a swaddled mummy, with a blue nose tip, 
dripping icicles. All in a moment appeared 
a smudge on the horizon — * a friend and 
brother — the King of the Trawlers.' 
* They're It, absolutely It,' said the Captain, 
^ No weather's too bad for 'em. They're 
our eyes and our ears. They know every 
blessed wave in the Channel, not merely 
as passing acquaintances, but they address 
'em by their Christian names. They'll do 
anything, and go anywhere and chance the 
luck. They're just simple fishermen, but 
they run the whole show and they run it 
magnificently — guns, semaphores, wireless, 
everything ! They live on kippers and tea, 
and I don't believe they ever go to sleep.' " 
If the Royal Navy, which has its own 
views on efficiency, says these things of them, 
further remarks seem needless. 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 

Quit now the dusty terraces and taverns of the town, 
And to the great green meadows you shall with us go 

down ; 
By the long capes and islands the open highways run 
For us the pilgrims of the sea, and pupils of the sun. 

'Tis Neptune pours the wine for us, the deep-sea Muses 

sing, 
And through our airy palaces the flutes of morning ring : 
We traffic with the stars, we trade adown the Milky Way, 
We are the pilots of romance, merchants of Arcady. 

Unfold a map of the world and observe how 
small a part of the earth's surface is land, 
how much less habitable land, how vast on 
the other hand — nearly three-quarters of 
the whole — the interminable plain of sea. 
Here you have an almost limitless expanse 
and without a barrier, here you have what 
was once the dividing flood, the estranging 
ocean, what is now Nature's great medium 
of communication. There are no difficult 
mountains to cross, no scorching deserts, 
the way lies open. One can sail round the 

94 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 95 

world without touching land, one cannot 
walk round it without somewhere crossing 
the sea. Imagine then a road which leads 
everywhere and you have the first clue to 
the meaning of that majestic thing, sea 
traffic. These immense regions, once so 
forbidding, and until a few hundred years 
ago, unknown, uncharted ocean solitudes, 
are now the broad highway of all the nations. 
Across them vessels under every flag, laden 
with all that men produce or peoples require, 
follow the plotted curves of the chart, and 
" toss the miles aside " with the same con- 
fidence, the same continuity as the trains 
on their iron tracks across Europe and 
America. They depart and arrive along 
the familiar belts of passenger and trade 
routes with the regularity and exactness of 
the great land expresses. Safe in times of 
peace from all dangers save the natural 
perils of the sea, the freedom of this, the 
broadest and busiest of all highways, open 
to all, used by all, vital to the modern struc- 
ture of civilisation, is unchallenged. Imagine 
this highway closed and the whole fabric 
falls to pieces, trade expires, commerce is 
at an end, famine and chaos impend 



96 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

over half the inhabited regions of the 
globe. 

Seated between the old world and the new, 
at the centre of traffic, at the midmost 
point of all the markets, Britain laid hold 
of her great opportunity. All the great 
routes were open to her, south to Africa, 
south-west to the Spanish Main and Panama, 
west to America and Canada, north-east to 
the Baltic, east through the pillars of Hercules 
to the Mediterranean, a route prolonged 
by the Suez Canal to India, China and 
Japan. The opportunity was, indeed, great, 
and to meet it she built her merchant navy, 
" the most stupendous monument," as 
BuUen wrote, " of human energy and enter- 
prise that the world has ever seen." What 
the nations bought and sold the ships of 
England carried. Necessity gave assistance, 
for as islanders her own people had need of 
overseas products and sent abroad their 
own manufactures. Nor was it disadvan- 
tageous that in order to build her fortunes 
she had to exhibit enterprise and cultivate 
hardihood. No one will say that the sea- 
farer's life is an easy one. But its discipline 
and hardships brought their reward in the 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 97 

courage and sustained vigour of the race. 
When it was a new thing the romance of this 
ocean travel took hold of the Elizabethan 
imagination, and the poets rhapsodised over 
" Labrador's high promontory cape," " the 
Pearled Isles," '^ the famous island Moga- 
dore," " the golden Tagus or the Western 
Inde." 

I should but lose myself and craze my brain 
Striving to give this glory of the main 
A full description, though the Muses nine 
Should quaff to me in rich Mendaeum wine. 

The EHzabethan poets gloried too in Britain's 
insularity : 

This precious stone set in the silver sea, 

protected by the waters as a house is pro- 
tected by a moat " against the envy of less 
happier lands." The historians have ex- 
pounded the advantages of her position. 
We were happy in that we were islanders, 
inhabiting a natural and impregnable fortress. 
The sea was our bulwark, to us it was no 
barrier, to the enemy an impassable one. 
The romantic mood is, however, difHcult 
to maintain, and of late the coming and 



98 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

going of some ten or eleven thousand British 
ships has been productive of Httle emotion. 
As a rule the landsman " dismisses the sea 
with a shudder." Rocks and shoals and 
icebergs and dark nights and fogs and the 
making of difficult harbours and winds of 
strength " 8 " on the Beaufort scale, are 
not things that habitually occupy his mind. 
Hourly our seamen were engaged in the 
routine of a perilous calling. Two thousand 
of them in times of peace lose their lives 
every year. We were not much concerned. 
But the submarine has now come to our 
assistance. It has at least this to its credit 
that we view our insularity with less com- 
posure. We see now that there are two sides 
to this blessing of insularity. We know now 
that every ton of food brought into the 
country is purchased with men's lives, and 
that is an arresting thought. We know, 
too, that if they do not continue to bring it 
we are in very evil case, a still more arresting 
and unfamiliar idea. We have had episodes 
and hours and experience it will not be easy 
to forget. There is something to be said 
for the submarine. It has proved to us 
that not to our encircling sea but to our 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 99 

sailors we owe our good fortune ; that the 
sea is as ready to ruin as to enrich us ; that 
in them, not in her, we must put our trust. 
" The one thing," it has been said, " that 
would really wake the nation to the vital 
importance of the Merchant Navy would be 
for the butcher, the baker, and the grocer 
to cease to ring the back-door bell every 
morning." Well, we have come within 
measurable distance of that and can now 
turn with the more appreciation to the 
anxieties and trials of the men who have 
averted the catastrophe. 

" It was passing beautiful to see, and to 
think of," says the old chronicler of a sea- 
battle in the Edwardian days ; '' the glisten- 
ing armour, the flags and streamers glancing 
and quivering in the wind." The beauty 
and the bravado which lingered on till 
Nelson's time are gone. Gone too are the 
courtesy and chivalry of the old sea battles. 
You need not go for romance, with the 
pleasant sting of brine in it, to the ugly 
and stealthy story of the German submarine. 
A dull monotonous history from first to 
last, as he who cares to run over the 
Admiralty files will find ; a baleful, intoler- 



100 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

able, damnable repetition. The very extent 
and enormity of the record deadens all sensi- 
bility, so that one soon begins to read 
mechanically, giving no thought to the matter, 
however terrible. Let us set down some 
sentences, each a verbal extract from the 
ofhcial record. 

" The crew were mustered after the ex- 
plosion and five men were missing." 

" While abandoning the ship the chief 
engineer was killed by the enemy's fire, and 
two of the crew were wounded." 

" Two of the crew were not seen after the 
explosion." 

" Two of the crew were killed and two 
were scalded." 

" Of the fifteen who left the ship only the 
chief officer and three others were saved." 

" While the ship was being abandoned 
the enemy continued to fire, hitting the 
ship and wounding five men." 

" One man who had been badly scalded 
died on board the patrol which picked up 
the boat." 

" The chief officer's boat was picked up 
at 10 a.m., the boatswain who had been 
wounded dying in the boat." 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS ioi 

" Eighteen of the crew went down in the 
vessel. One boat reached the shore but 
there was a heavy sea running and two 
men were drowned while attempting to 
land." 

" In one of the boats picked up twenty- 
four hours after the vessel's destruction 
were seventeen dead and frozen bodies." 

" The submarine rendered no assistance. 
The commander looked at the men in the 
water, and shook his fist, saying something 
in German." 

" The master's boat with seven men kept 
at the oars for forty hours, having a heavy 
sea to contend with. The steward died in 
the boat from exhaustion. On reaching 
the shore the boat capsized, but all six 
reached land, though the second engineer 
and a fireman died immediately on the 
beach." 

" The ship was hove to in a gale of wind 
when she was torpedoed without warning 
by an unseen submarine. The ship was 
abandoned by the crew in three boats. 
Two men were drowned while manning the 
boats. The apprentice who made his report 
states that the chief officer's boat, when last 



102 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

seen, was apparently filled with water, lying 
broadside on to the sea. . . . The boat of 
the apprentice which had been lying to 
with a sea-anchor out, made sail at dawn 
and steered for the land. At 9.30 the 
survivors were picked up. While drifting 
in the gale six of the crew of this boat died 
and were buried at sea. . . . Only nine 
men from the steamship were landed, 
suffering from exposure and frostbite." 

" At 8.40 the boat capsized owing to the 
sea, and sight of the other boat was lost. 
All hands (sixteen) regained boat, but she 
was full of water. Before midnight she had 
again capsized three times and then only 
four hands were left. About 8 a.m. two 
seamen became exhausted and were washed 
overboard. A handkerchief on a stick failed 
to attract the attention of a passing vessel. 
About 5 o'clock the first mate dropped into 
the water in the boat and died. His body 
and the only survivor were picked up two 
days after the sinking of the vessel." 
What profit in further citations from this 
baleful volume ? Multiply these records by 
hundreds and one begins to appreciate the 
prowess of the enemy in dealing with defence- 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 103 

less vessels. Gentlemen of the German Navy, 
we congratulate you ! 

The official phraseology does not help 
us to realise these happenings. The records 
deal only in flat commonplaces. There is 
not a picturesque v^ord anyv^here, no sign 
of emotion, an utter absence of psychology. 
We are not told how the men felt when 
the shells struck the ship or the torpedo 
tore out its entrails. They appear to do just 
ordinary sensible things and probably the 
ideas that occurred to them were ordinary 
sensible ideas. When the steering gear is 
shattered or the engines disabled they do 
their best to repair the damage. If a boat 
capsizes they try to right her. When 
attacked by aeroplanes they take up a rifle, 
if there is one aboard, and fire at them, 
without much effect. But what else can 
you do ? As for excitement, these men 
are not given to it. Nerve storms are not 
in their line of life. 

The look-out man under the conditions 
of the new warfare has need of his eyesight. 
Dangers overhead, dangers on the surface, 
dangers underfoot. To scan at one and the 
same moment the horizon for the conning- 



104 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

tower of a U-boat, the water around and 
ahead of him for mines, and the sky for 
approaching aircraft, is a task inconsistent 
with any form of contemplative philosophy. 
A chapter on " Pleasant Half-hours with 
Aeroplanes " will form a part of future 
histories of the Merchant Service. Witness 
the experience of the Avocet on her voyage 
from Rotterdam. '' The weather being calm 
and clear, sea smooth, but foul with drifting 
mines, three aeroplanes were observed coming 
up from the Belgian Coast, one being a 
large ^ battle-plane.' In a few minutes they 
were circling over the ship, and the battle- 
plane dropped the first bomb, which hit 
the water fifteen feet away, making a terrific 
report, flames and water rising up for 50 
feet, and afterwards leaving the surface of 
the sea black over a radius of 30 feet, as 
far as it was possible to judge. Altogether 
thirty-six bombs were dropped, all falling 
close, six of them missing the steamer by 
not more than 7 feet. 

" After apparently exhausting all the 
bombs, the battle-plane took up a position 
off the port beam and opened fire at the 
bridge with a machine gun. The ship's 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 105 

sides, decks, and water were struck with 
many bullets — it was like a shower of 
hail. A port in the chief engineer's room 
was pierced and his bed filled with broken 
glass. 

" The battle-plane was handled with great 
skill, attacking from a height of from 800 to 
1000 feet. Going ahead of the ship, he turned 
and came end on to meet her, and when 
parallel to her dropped his bombs so as to 
have her full length and make sure of scoring 
a hit. The ship's helm was put hard-a- 
starboard, and as she swung to port three 
bombs missed the starboard bow and three 
the port quarter by at most 7 feet. Had 
the vessel kept her course these bombs 
would have landed on the forecastle head 
and poop deck. 

" The two smaller planes crossed and 
recrossed the Avocet, dropping their bombs 
as they passed over her. They all made a 
most determined attempt to sink the ship, 
which only failed because they hadn't nerve 
enough to fly lower. 

" After the first bomb was dropped a 
rapid rifle fire was commenced, which was 
kept up until the rifles were uncomfortably 



io6 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

hot. The chief officer of the Avocet was 
lucky enough to explode a rocket distress 
signal within a few feet of one Taube ; 
had it hit him there would have been a 
wreck in mid-air. The action lasted thirty- 
five minutes, and when it was over and the 
aeroplanes flew away the decks of the Avocet 
were littered with shrapnel. . . . The 
look-out man on the forecastle head actually 
reported a floating mine right ahead of the 
ship, while bombs were bursting all around. 
He stuck to his post through it all, and kept 
a good look-out." 

It is the habit of nations to recall and 
glorify their past, to dwell with satisfaction 
upon the doings of their heroes, the achieve- 
ments of their great men. These enter into 
and become a part of the national life. 
Perhaps the world may yet see another 
and a rarer thing — a nation weeping at 
the tomb of its honour. For with what 
emotion — will it be one of happiness ? — can 
the Germany of to-morrow recall a history 
like the following ? 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 107 

French S.S. Venezia, 
Fabre Line, 
At Sea, March iSth, 191 7. 

The Managers, 
Messrs The Union Castle Mail S.S. Co. (Ltd.) 
London. 

Gentlemen, — With deep regret I have to 
report the loss of your steamer Alnwick Castle j 
which was torpedoed without warning at 
6.10 a.m. on Monday, March 19, in a 
position about 320 miles from the Scilly 
Islands. 

At the time of the disaster there were on 
board, besides one hundred members of my 
own crew and fourteen passengers, the captain 
and twenty-four of the crew of the collier 
transport Trevose^ whom I had rescued from 
their boats at 5.30 p.m. on the previous day, 
Sunday, March 18, their ship having been 
torpedoed at 11 a.m. that day, two Arab 
firemen being killed by the explosion, which 
wrecked the engine-room. 

I attach a list of survivors from my life- 
boat rescued by the S.S. Venezia on Friday, 
March 23, together with those who perished 



io8 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

from exposure and thirst in the boat. It 
may be summarised as follows : 

Captain and crew of Alnwick 

Castle . . . '13 souls 

Third-class passengers . . 6 

Crew of Trevose ... 5 

24 survivors 

Crew of Alnwick Castle who 
perished in lifeboat . . 5 

Total occupants of No. i life- 
boat . . . .29 

I was being served with morning coffee 
at about 6,10 a.m. when the explosion 
occurred, blowing up the hatches and beams 
from No. 2 and sending up a high column 
of water and debris which fell back on the 
bridge. The chief officer put the engines 
full astern, and I directed him to get the 
boats away. All our six boats were safely- 
launched and left the ship, which was rapidly 
sinking by the head. 

The forecastle was now (6.30 a.m.) just 
dipping, though the ship maintained an up- 
right position without list. The people in 
my boat were clamouring for me to come, 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 109 

as they were alarmed by the danger of the 
ship plunging. The purser informed me 
that every one was out of the ship, and I 
then took Mr Carnaby from his post, and 
we went down to No. i boat and pulled 
away. At a safe distance we waited to see 
the end of the Alnwick Castle. Then we 
observed the submarine quietly emerge from 
the sea end on to the ship with a gun trained 
on her. She showed no periscope — just a 
conning-tower and a gun as she lay there — 
silent and sinister. In about ten minutes 
the Alnwick Castle plunged bow first below 
the surface ; her whistle gave one blast 
and the main topmast broke off, there was 
a smothered roar and a cloud of dirt, and we 
were left in our boats, 139 people, 300 miles 
from land. The submarine lay between 
the boats, but whether she spoke any of 
them I do not know. She proceeded north- 
east after a steamer which was homeward 
bound about four miles away, and soon after 
we saw a tall column of water, etc., and 
knew that she had found another victim. 

I got in touch with all the boats, and 
from the number of their occupants I was 
satisfied that every one was safely in them. 



no THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

Tlie one lady passenger and her baby three 
months old were with the stewardess in 
the chief officer's boat. I directed the third 
officer to transfer four of his men to the 
second officer's boat to equalise the number, 
and told them all to steer between east 
and east-north-east for the Channel. We 
all made sail before a light westerly wind, 
which freshened before sunset, when we 
reefed down. After dark I saw no more 
of the other boats. That was Monday, 
March 19. 

I found only three men who could help 
me to steer, and one of these subsequently 
became delirious, leaving only three of us. 
At 2 a.m. Tuesday, the wind and sea had 
increased to a force when I deemed it un- 
safe to sail any longer ; also it was working 
to the north-west and north-north-west. 
I furled the sail and streamed the sea-anchor, 
and we used the canvas boat-cover to afford 
us some shelter from the constant spray 
and bitter wind. At daylight we found 
our sea-anchor and the rudder had both 
gone. There was too much sea to sail ; 
we manoeuvred with oars, whilst I lashed 
two oars together and made another sea- 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS iii 

anchor. We spent the whole of Tuesday 
fighting the sea, struggling with oars to 
assist the sea-anchor to head the boat up 
to the waves, constantly soaked with cold 
spray and pierced with the bitter wind, 
which was now from the north. I served 
out water twice daily, one dipper between 
two men, which made a portion about equal 
to one-third of a condensed-milk tin. We 
divided a tin of milk between four men 
once a day, and a tin of beef (6 lbs.) 
was more than sufficient to provide a 
portion for each person (twenty-nine) once 
a day. At midnight Tuesday- Wednesday, the 
northerly wind fell light, and we made sail 
again, the wind gradually working to north- 
east and increasing after sunrise. All the 
morning and afternoon of Wednesday we 
kept under way until about 8 p.m., when 
I was compelled to heave-to again. During 
this day the iron step of our mast gave way 
and our mast and sail went overboard, but 
we saved them, and were able to improvise 
a new step with the aid of an axe and 
piece of wood fitted to support the boat- 
cover strong-back. We were now feeling the 
pangs of thirst as well as the exhaustion 



112 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

of labour and exposure and want of sleep. 
Some pitiful appeals were made for water. 
I issued an extra ration to a few of the 
weaker ones only. 

During the night of Wednesday-Thursday 
the wind dropped for a couple of hours 
and several showers of hail fell. The 
hailstones were eagerly scraped from our 
clothing and swallowed. I ordered the sail 
to be spread out in the hope of catching 
water from a rain shower, but we were dis- 
appointed in this, for the rain was too light. 
Several of the men were getting light- 
headed, and I found that they had been 
drinking salt water in spite of my earnest 
and vehement order. 

It was with great difficulty that anyone 
could be prevailed on to bale out the water, 
which seemed to leak into the boat at an 
astonishing rate, perhaps due to some rivets 
having been started by the pounding she 
had received. 

At 4 a.m. the wind came away again 
from north-east and we made sail, but 
unfortunately it freshened again and we 
were constantly soaked with spray and had 
to be always baling. Our water was now 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 113 

very low, and we decided to mix condensed 
milk with it. Most of the men were now 
helpless, and several were raving in delirium. 
The foreman cattleman, W. Kitcher, died 
and was buried. Soon after dark the sea 
became confused and angry ; I furled the 
tiny reef sail and put out the sea-anchor. 
At 8 p.m. we were swamped by a breaking 
sea and I thought all was over. A moan 
of despair rose in the darkness, but I shouted 
to them, " Bale, bale, bale," and assured 
them that the boat could not sink. How 
they found the balers and bucket in the 
dark I don't know, but they managed to 
free the boat, whilst I shifted the sea-anchor 
to the stern and made a tiny bit of sail and 
got her away before the wind. After that 
escape the wind died away about midnight, 
and then we spent a most distressing night. 
Several of the men collapsed and others 
temporarily lost their reason, and one of 
these became pugnacious and climbed about 
the boat uttering complaints and threats. 

The horror of that night, together with 
the physical suffering, are beyond my power 
of description. Before daylight, however, 
on March 23, the wind permitting, I managed, 

H 



114 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

with the help of the few who remained 
able, to set sail again, hoping now to be 
in the Bay of Biscay and to surely see 
some vessel to succour us. Never a sail or 
wisp of smoke had we seen. When day- 
light came the appeals for water were so 
angry and insistent that I deemed it best 
to make an issue at once. After that 
had gone round, amidst much cursing and 
snatching, we could see that only one more 
issue remained. One fireman, Thomas, was 
dead ; another was nearly gone ; my steward, 
Buckley, was almost gone ; we tried to pour 
some milk and water down his throat, but 
he could not swallow. No one could now 
eat biscuits ; it was impossible to swallow 
anything solid, our throats were afire, our 
lips furred, our limbs numbed, our hands 
were white and bloodless. During the fore- 
noon, Friday 23rd, another fireman named 
Tribe died, and my steward, Buckley, died ; 
also a cattleman, whose only name I could 
get as Peter, collapsed and died about noon. 

To our unspeakable relief we were 
rescued about 1.30 p.m. on Friday, 23rd, 
by the French steamer Venezia^ of the Fabre 
Line, for New York for horses. A con- 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 115 

siderable swell was running, and in our 
enfeebled state we were unable to properly 
manoeuvre our boat, but the French captain, 
M. Paul Bonifacie, handled his empty vessel 
with great skill and brought her alongside 
us, sending out a lifebuoy on a line for 
us to seize. We were unable to climb the 
ladders, so they hoisted us one by one in 
ropes until the twenty-four live men were 
aboard. The four dead bodies were left 
in the boat, and she was fired at by the 
gunners of the Venezia in order to destroy 
her, but the shots did not take effect. 

I earnestly hope that the other five 
boats have been picked up, for I fear that 
neither of the small accident boats had 
much chance of surviving the weather I 
experienced. At present I have not yet 
regained fully the use of my hands and 
feet, but hope to be fit again before my 
arrival in England, when I trust you will 
honour me with appointment to another ship. 

I am. Gentlemen, your obedient servant, 
{Signed) Benj. Chave. 

Steamship Alnwick Castle torpedoed at 
6.10 a.m. 1 9/3/1 7. Crew rescued by Steam- 



ii6 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

ship Venezia^ 23/3/17, and landed at New 
York : — B. Chave, master ; H. Macdougall, 
chief engineer ; R. G. D. Speedy, doctor ; 
R. E. Jones, purser ; N. E. Carnaby, Marconi 
operator ; K. R. Hemmings, cadet ; S. Merrels, 
quartermaster ; T. Morris, A.B, ; A. Meill, 
greaser ; F. Softley, fireman ; H. Weyers, 
assistant steward ; S. Hopkins, fireman. 

Deaths. — R. Thomas, fireman ; Tribe, 
fireman and trimmer ; Buckley, captain^ s 
steward ; W. Kitcher, foreman cattleman ; 
Peter (?), cattleman. 

Rescued passengers ex " Alnwick Castle^'' yrd 
class, — J. Wilson, J. Burley, G. Eraser, D. J. 
Williams, W. T. Newham, E. O. Morrison. 

There are, of course, records which pro- 
vide better reading. " When the ship was 
22 miles S.S.E. from Flambro' Head," 
writes an officer, " the second mate 
reported he saw a mine. To pass a mine 
involves a penalty, so I turned back and 
got close to it. It had five prongs on it, 
and was right in the track of shipping. As 
I had no gun to destroy it, and in the vicinity 
of Flambro' would be the nearest patrol 
boat, I thought it best to put a mark on 
it, as we would possibly lose it through the 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 117 

niglit, and settle someone coming along. 
I ordered the small boat out although there 
was a moderate breeze S.W. with quite a 
choppy sea, also a N.E. swell. I could not 
ask anyone to go and make a line fast to it, 
as it is a very dangerous object to handle, 
so I decided to go myself. When lowering 
the boat down, Mr Oliver (chief officer) 
and Blanche the boatswain got into her, 
and wished to share the danger. I asked 
them to consider, and say their prayers. 
I also ordered the second mate that as soon 
as he saw we were connected with the mine 
to send the lifeboat to take us off the small 
boat, as we intended to leave her as a buoy 
or mark to the mine, and then we would 
advise another ship to send patrol steamer. 
We got to the mine, but had great difficulty 
making a rope fast to it, owing to its peculiar 
shape. After two failures, we fell on a 
plan to make the rope stop from slipping 
under it. We put a timber-hitch round the 
body of the mine and hung the hitch up 
with strands to two of the horns. What 
with the bobbing up and down and keeping 
the boat from coming down on the horns, 
and cold water, it was no nice job. Any- 



ii8 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

how it got finished at last, and it seemed so 
secure that I thought we would be able to 
tow it until we met a patrol boat, so when 
the lifeboat came I returned on board 
her, and took her on board. She got 
damaged putting her out and taking in, 
owing to the ship rolling. I now picked 
up the small boat with the other two men 
and got another line connected on to the 
one on the mine and went slow ahead. This 
worked all right, but I thought she could 
go faster so put on full speed. This was 
now 6 p.m. About five minutes after full 
speed the mine exploded and sent the water 
and a column of black smoke from two to 
three hundred feet in the air. Several 
pieces of the mine fell on deck, small bits, 
also small stuff like clinker from the funnel. 
It was a relief to all hands, and possibly- 
saved some other ship's mishap, as we met 
about twenty that night on the opposite 
course to us." 

Worthy of the best sea company is the 
story of Robert Fergusson, a Glasgow man 
but a naturalised American, and his com- 
panions, Smith and Welch, who refused in 
the heaviest of gales to leave the tug Valiant^ 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 119 

when she was abandoned by her captain 
and crew in mid- Atlantic. ^' I wouldn't 
have brought her back for all the money 
in the world if the British Government 
hadn't wanted her," he said, " but I knew 
that every ship was wanted." Fortified by 
that thought Fergusson determined to stand 
by the vessel and save her if she could be 
saved. " Show your Yankee spirit," he cried 
to the Americans in the crew. And Welch 
responded, " I'm for you." " I'll not quit 
either," said Smith the fireman. And the 
great liner which had stood by and taken 
off the others left them — the three men — 
to fight their way homeward, if indeed that 
forlorn hope might succeed, in the battered 
craft, through the worst weather the Atlantic 
had known that winter. Smothered by great 
seas, with all the tug's gear on deck smashed 
or adrift, the three fought on, Fergusson 
on the bridge, Welch at the engines, and 
Smith toiling in the stokehold, each alone. 
Then the stearing gear went, and the vessel 
was thrown on her beam ends. Wallowing 
in the trough, it seemed impossible that 
she could live, the seas mounting to her 



^PP 



er deck. But live she did, and without 



120 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

food or drink, with the last ounce of their 
strength spent and more than spent, sup- 
ported by their own dauntless determination 
and that incalculable fortune which loves 
to side with a superb undertaking, they 
made land and the port of Cardiff, to the 
honour of both Britain and America, an 
alliance we may believe invincible. 

To read too of men like the trawler 
skipper, who, when a shell from a pursu- 
ing submarine smashed part of the wheel 
under his hands. " went on steering with 
the broken spokes," fought his enemy with his 
light gun and finally drove him off, makes 
one feel that it is something to have 
entered life under British colours. Sir Percy 
Scott, in his forecast of the character mari- 
time war would probably assume, can 
hardly have had the British sailor in his 
eye when he wrote, " Trade is timid, it 
will not need more than one or two ships 
sent to the bottom to hold up the food supply 
of this country." How overwhelming is 
the evidence for this timidity. The timidity 
of Captain Lane, for instance, who con- 
tinued to fight the enemy submarine amid 
the flames which its shell fire had produced, 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 121 

beat off his pursuer, and when the crew were 
safely in the boats and the vessel in a sinking 
condition, with the assistance of the engineer 
himself, beached his ship, and finally sub- 
duing the flames, repaired the damages and 
resumed his voyage. The timidity of the 
Parslows, father and son — the father killed 
at the wheel, succeeded by the son, who 
resolutely held on his course and saved his 
vessel. The timidity of Captain Pillar, who 
saved seventy men of the Formidable by 
incomparable seamanship and a daring 
manoeuvre in a furious gale, or of Captain 
Walker of the transport Mercian, an un- 
armed vessel, crowded with troops, who 
kept on his way undeterred by the storm 
of shells from the enemy, though his decks 
were full of dead and wounded. The 
timidity aboard the Thordis, a heavily-laden 
collier, attacked when head to wind and sea 
an easy victim, capable of no more than 
three knots, whose captain put over his 
helm, and crashing into the astonished enemy 
sent her to the bottom. There is the story 
of the timid skipper of the Wandle, another 
collier, who, blown off his feet on the bridge 
by the concussion of a shell, gave back shot 



122 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

for shot, sank his enemy, and in his little 
vessel, her flag still flying, made a triumphal 
progress up the Thames with her rent bul- 
warks as proof of her timidity ; the syrens 
on the tugs ahead and astern advertising it ; 
the bells ringing at Greenwich Hospital, and 
riverside London cheering itself hoarse for 
joy of it. There is the story of the timid 
Captain Kinneir, who, ordered to stop by 
a German cruiser, north of Magellan Straits, 
answered the order by driving his ship, 
the Ortega^ right into Nelson's Straits, the 
most gloomy ocean defile in the world, 
without anchorage, an uncharted channel 
never before attempted, which no seaman 
knows or desires to know, and so baflled 
his pursuers, who dared not follow. You 
cannot capture the record, for it outruns 
description. These timid captains, in the 
spirit of the old English, fight till none is 
left to fight. 

Then there are the timid apprentices and 
deck-hands and engineers. The seas swarm 
with them, they are to be found on every 
cargo tank and collier and transport and 
ocean liner. You cannot rid yourself of 
these nervous sea-farers. There was Davies, 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 123 

second officer of the Armenian, who saved 
thirty-five of her crew ; and Hetherington 
of the Jacona, who in somewhat similar 
circumstances swam from the sinking ship 
to a drifting boat, into which he dragged 
his shipmates clinging to drifting wreckage. 
There were the engineers of the Southfort, 
at the Carolines, seized by the German 
corvette Geier, Left with her machinery 
dismantled that she might serve as an enemy 
store ship, these men in twelve days of feverish 
work replaced the essential parts, and set- 
ting sail made Brisbane, 2000 miles away, 
in a ship capable only of steaming one way. 
There was the half-hour's work of three 
men, Engineers Wilson, East, and the mate 
Gooderham, a fishing boat mined in the 
North Sea, the first of whom, heedless of 
the scalding steam in the damaged engine- 
room, rushed in, and after desperate exertions 
plugged the hole caused by the explosion, 
while East dragged from an almost hopeless 
position in the bunker, the imprisoned stoker, 
and Gooderham swung a boat over and 
rescued under the overhanging side of another 
trawler, mined at the same time, seven of her 
crew. Look through the long list of Admiralty 



124 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

rewards for timidity in rescue work, in battles 
against odds, in seamanship. Germany, 
hanging on the arm of the false jade to 
whom she has sold herself, the creed of 
frightfulness, was very sure. 

" Swept clear of ships," was her description 
of the Channel. Pathetic delusion ! Why, 
it is more like a maritime fair. Never was 
there such a bustle of shipping since the 
world was made. An average of over a 
hundred merchant ships a day pass through 
the narrow gateway guarded by the Dover 
patrol. Motor boats, flocks of them ; scores 
of traders at anchor in the Downs ; busy 
transports on their way to Havre ; up to 
windward a cluster of mine-sweepers ; down 
to leeward a line of lean destroyers. It is 
night and day with them as with all the ships, 
through every changing mood of the Channel 
— rain, storm, snow blizzards, sunshine and 
sweet airs or " wind like a whetted knife." 
For this is the gate of all the gates, the vital 
trade route, and from Foreland to Start, from 
Start to Lizard in three years of war the 
German fleet has not seen these famous head- 
lands ! Very busy, but very much at home, 
are the British vessels in that long sea lane. 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 125 

Talkative, too, for the gossip never ceases. 
Hoarse megaphone conversations, rocket and 
semaphore talk, v^ireless chatter without end. 
Within a fev^ hours' steaming of the lively- 
scene, when you may count as many as 
fifty vessels within sight at one time, lies 
the magnificent German fleet, for it is mag- 
nificent, save the British, the finest the world 
has ever seen, equipped with all the most 
destructive engines the heart of man could 
devise. Hindenburg and his devoted divi- 
sions suffer terrible things under the fire of 
4000 British guns, discharging 200,000 tons 
of shells within the passage of a few short 
weeks. Admirals Von Scheer and Von Hipper 
pace their quarter-decks and take no notice. 
They know that these guns, these shells, and 
the troops behind them can enter France 
only by water. Here surely was their oppor- 
tunity, and yet only in the outer seas, and 
there only by furtive attacks, is the trans- 
port upon which all depends anywhere 
impeded. 

That the bridge from England to France 
stands firm, that the Channel is no sundering 
gulf, but as it were solid land, may seem 
to us as natural as it is essential, but that 



126 THE FLEETS BEHIND THE FLEET 

it does stand firm is not merely, if we ponder 
it, a wonder in itself, it is perhaps the greatest 
of the wonders that we have witnessed in 
these amazing years. By the navy that vital 
area, that great and indispensable bridge 
has been securely held, and when we say 
" the navy " let us now and always mean 
nothing short of British ships and sailors any- 
where, everywhere, in all the range and variety 
of their sea-faring activities. Let us separate 
them neither in our thoughts nor our affec- 
tions, and say of our merchant sailors and 
fishermen as of the Royal Navy that — ^what 
was expected of them they accomplished, 
what was required of them they gave ; if 
courage it was there, if skill it was always 
forthcoming, if death they offered their 
lives freely. There were among them no 
strikers or conscientious objectors. In all 
the virtues that mankind have held honour- 
able they need not fear comparison either 
with their own ancestors or with their 
adversaries. From " the stoker who put 
his soul into his shovel " to the captain 
who was the last to leave his ship they 
upheld beyond reproach the chivalry of the 
great sea tradition. And if we say that 



THE SEA TRAFFICKERS 127 

the last chapter of the Merchant Sailor's 
history, tested by any standard you care 
to apply, is nobler than any previously 
written, we do him no more than justice, 
and yet ask for him universal and wondering 
admiration. 



APPENDIX A 

Summary of the Losses sustained 
BY Neutrals 

From August 8, 191 4, to April 26, 191 7 





s 


■s 




H 


CO 




Total 

Ascertained 

Tonnage 


Dutch . 


41 


35 


76 


148,921 


Swedish 


30 


71 


lOI 


99,628 


Norwegian 


54 


382 


436 


987,816 


Danish . 


20 


94 


114 


123,385 


Spanish . 


2 


33 


35 


75,7^9 


American 


4 


16 


20 


59.256 


Brazilian 


• • 


2 


2 


6,719 


Greek . 


I 


59 


60 


147.923 


Argentine 


• « 


I 


I 


281 


Peruvian 


• • 


I 


I 


1,419 


Uruguayan 


• • 


I 


I 


2,537 


Total 


152 


69s 


847 


1,653,654 



129 



APPENDIX B 



Imports during the War 
Wheat 



I9II . 


. 98,000,000 cwts. 


I9I2 . 


. 110,000,000 „ 


I9I3 • 


. 106,000,000 „ 


I9I4 . 


. 104,000,000 „ 


I9I5 . 


89,000,000 „ 


I9I6 . 


. 100,000,000 „ 




Iron Ore 


I9II . 


6,346,000 tons. 


I9I2 . 


6,602,000 „ 


I9I3 • 


7,442,000 „ 


I9I4 . 


5,705,000 „ 


I9IS . 


6,197,000 „ 


I9I6 . 


6,906,000 „ 




Cotton 


I9II . 


. 22,071,000 centals of 100 lbs. 


I9I2 . 


. 28,058,000 „ „ 


I9I3 • 


. 21,742,000 „ „ 


I9I4 . 


. 18,641,000 „ „ 


I9IS . 


. 26,476,000 „ „ 


I9I6 . 


. 21,710,000 „ „ 


130 





APPENDIX C 

The following was the strength of the 
Royal Naval Reserve on the ist of January 

1914 :— 

1914 1917 

Officers of the Military 

Branch . 

Probationary Midship- 
men (new scheme) . 

Commissioned Engineer 

Officers . . . irn r 8>5oo 

Assistant Paymasters 

(Accountants) . . 106 

Warrant Engineers . 174 



1,250 X 

SI 

150 



Engineroom Artificers 
Seaman ratings . 
Stoker ratings 
Trawler Section . 



10 
S 



546 
,019 / ' 



000 



34>QQQ 
18,500 62,500 



APPENDIX D 

Value of Imports for Home Consumption 
AND Exports of Home Produce 

Exports 
^^454,000,000 
487,000,000 
525,000,000 
431,000,000 
385,000,000 
507,000,000 

131 





Imports 


I9II . 


. lS77POQ,OOQ 


I9I2 . 


633,000,000 


I9I3 • 


659,000,000 


I9I4 . 


601,000,000 


I9I5 . 


755jOoo,ooo 


I9I6 . 


852,000,000 



APPENDIX E 

FIRING ON SURVIVORS IN BOATS 

LIST OF AUTHENTICATED CASES 

The International Conference of Merchant Seamen, 
meeting at Anderton's Hotel, has drawn up the following 
list of authenticated instances of enemy submarines firing 
on survivors whilst in ships' boats : — 

I. Kildare, British s.s. Sunk by submarine, April 12, 1917. Whilst 
boats were pulling clear of ship shells came over them and then a 
submarine was seen on the surface. She fired from 10 to 15 shells 
at the boats, killing an A.B. 

3. John W. Pearn, British s.s. Sunk by submarine, May i, 1917. Sub- 
marine fired two shots at boat, which was pulling away. 

3. Fw/ca«a, British s.s. Sunk by submarine, March 7, 1917. After boat 

had been got out, she capsized in the heavy swell running, and had 
to be righted. Firing was continued by the submarine until boat 
was clear. 

4. Belgian Prince, British s. s. Sunk by submarine, July 31, 1917. Life- 

boats not fired on, but broken up and survivors thrown into sea 
after being placed on outside of submarine, which submerged, 
leaving them to their fate, after also depriving them of lifebelts. 

5. Westminster, British s.s. Sunk by submarine, December 14, 1916. 

Survivors took to boats and were shelled by submarine, captain and 
chief officer being killed. 

6. Eavestone, British s.s. Sunk by submarine, February 3, 1917. Sub- 

marine turned her gun on boats, firing three shrapnel shells and 
striking both boats. Third shell killed master, steward, donkey- 
man, and two A. B.'s ; severely wounded second ofiicer. 

7. Addah, British s.s. Sunk by submarine, June 15, 1917. Submarine 

opened fire on master's boat, killing eight men, and after boat had 
been sunk and men were swimming in the water, submarine shelled 
them with shrapnel. 

8. C/z»(zr?a, British s.s. Sunk by submarine, May 26, 1917. Submarine 

fired on boat, injuring all occupants. 

9. Vanland, Swedish s.s. Attacked by submarine, July 23, 1917. As 

lifeboat was making for shore, submarine continued to fire on master 
and crew with machine-gun, wounding the second mate. 

10. Baltic, Swedish s.s. Sunk by submarine, June 27, 1917. Boats 

fired on for about an hour after crew abandoned ship. 

11. Freden, Danish s.s. Sunk by submarine, May 22, 1917. Lifeboat 

damaged, and several of crew wounded while trying to mend it ; 
one Frenchman killed, other severely wounded. 

12. Hestia, Dutch s.s. Sunk by submarine, March 30, 1917. One boat 

fired on by submarine and sunk, six Dutchmen and seven China- 
men being killed. 



Printed in Great Britain by TurnbuU &' Sfears^ Edinburgh 



'■ 



! NEW ZEALAND 

I BUTTER,CHEeSE,/VlEAT, 
ISHEEPSKrNS.TALLOW.WOOLj 

"""""""' 1IIIIII 'iihi ami IN wmmu\i}tt\\\w i jrrrtiii .^tifeTnim i Mttft^jl 



Stanford^ Geogl Estal^ London. 



THE MARKETS OF THE WORLD. 

OPEN TO GREAT BRITAIN: CLOSED TO GERMANY. 



After more than two years of war the 
markets of the world remain open to Great Britain. 
From every corner of the earth she continues to 
draw supplies and, thanks to the supremacy of her 
invincible Navy, her world-resources are illimitable. 
This map shews the sources from which she 
obtains her varied imports, which« during the 
quarter ending June 30th, 1916, amounted in value 
to £245,743,639. 




NEW ZEALAND 

Butter.CheesejMeat, 
Sh EEP Ski ns.Tallo w,Wool J 



Stanford Geogl Estahi, Londan. 



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